Some Free Advice for Ford

Stop treating your workers poorly and reap the rewards.

I instantly knew the solution to Ford CEO Jim Farley’s recent lament that his dealerships cannot find mechanics: This was a job for a management consultant. Being one myself, my day (and night, and weekend) job is to advise large, complex companies on how to address their most pressing challenges, which frequently includes attracting talent, training people efficiently, and retaining critical skills and know-how over time. The issue here seemed much simpler.

As the Wall Street Journal described in, “The $160,000 Mechanic Job That Ford Can’t Fill,” Ford has an acute need for 5,000 highly skilled technicians, but has created an employee journey that is a minefield of friction, risk, and volatility. Upfront costs are prohibitive and borne by students and early-career professionals, progression is slow and unevenly supported, and pay is inconsistent.

No wonder people aren’t knocking down the door to pursue this career path. Consulting firms would struggle to fill their ranks, too, under those circumstances.

Reading about Ted, a master technician at a Ford dealership profiled in the piece, I couldn’t help but compare his path with my own experience at a Big 3 consulting firm, where recruitment, early-career pay, training, tooling, and progression are deliberately designed to smooth intake, reduce risk, and (to a point) retain talent. Consulting firms are far from perfect, pressure is constant, and many people wash out, but the system is intentionally designed to get people in the door, make them productive, and absorb the risk along the way. That contrast is stark, and it’s instructive for Ford and its shortage of Teds.

Ted attended a two-year professional degree program that cost him $30,000. This is a meaningful sum for a young man fresh out of high school and a costly personal barrier. It is an expense that would be absorbable, even at scale, for a company the size of Ford. At my employer and peer companies, by contrast, high-potential employees can often count on the company to foot the bill for an MBA that costs far more than Ted’s training, so long as they agree to stay with the firm for a few years afterward. If Ford is concerned about employees taking Ford-funded skills to competitors, it could require a similar work commitment from future mechanics.

Even with subsidized training, however, it is fair to ask why someone would choose this path for a $10-per-hour starting wage. This is not a product of laziness despite what the Boomers in the comments section might suggest, it is rational economic decision-making. Young people today have alternatives that do not require fronting the cost of expensive tools and accepting roughly $20,000 a year in early earnings. In professional services, firms routinely “invest” in new hires, placing them on projects in which they are not billed to clients but are fully paid while they learn the ropes. The message is clear: the firm sees long-term value in the employee that justifies absorbing short-term cost, and the employee can pay rent, which is nice too. Ford, and companies facing similar shortages, could learn from this logic.

If a business showed up for a recruiting event and informed prospective applicants that they would be expected to pay for their own laptops or front the cost of their travel, they would be laughed out of the tasteless glass-and-steel auditorium at my business school. The firms that recruited us assign senior employees to conduct mock interviews, literally rehearsing candidates for the real thing.

Against that backdrop, it is striking that an industry facing an acute labor shortage still asks new mechanics to supply their own tools to do work the company urgently needs done. Of the shortage, Farley remarked, “a bay with a lift and tools and no one to work in it.” If that is true, it seems like the company’s got the tools to spare.

Even once Ted has paid for his tools, fronted the cost of his education, and endured a $10-per-hour starting wage, he still has to deal with “flat-rate” pay, a system where technicians are paid by the job rather than by the hour. This piecework-style arrangement looks less like the type of stable, long-term employment arrangement workers actively seek and more like a bad freelance gig, complete with income volatility and little downside protection.

It creates two related problems. When business is slow and there are fewer transmissions to fix, Ted’s pay drops through no fault of his own. When business is booming, the system rewards speed above all else, pushing technicians to work as fast as possible to maximize earnings. That might sound fine if Ted were a coder pounding out pull requests from a standing desk. In a physically demanding job like auto repair, it simply accelerates the wear and tear that leads to injuries, shortened careers, and, in some cases, lasting harm.

When management consultants aren’t billing client work, they’re said to be “on the bench” or “the beach.” There, they might work on business development, go through training, or even catch their breath. While no consultant wants to stay unbillable for too long, bench time is always paid in full. If Ford wants to incentivize performance, it already has a far less punishing option: pay people a stable base and reward productivity with performance bonuses, kind of like the ones that management gets.

The article’s image of Ted wincing as he tightens a bolt he can barely reach makes one thing obvious: this is hard, physical work, and there’s no getting around it. Car parts are heavy. Working twisted on your back all day is rough. But that doesn’t mean an employer is out of options. If flat-rate pay were abandoned and Ted were treated like a real employee, he could take time off when injured knowing a paycheck would still show up. That alone would reduce the incentive to work through pain and turn minor injuries into permanent ones.

Over time, the physical demands of the job may mean that Ted’s days as a full-time technician are numbered. That should not mean the end of his career. Ford can do more to prepare technicians for what comes next—training roles, diagnostics, supervision, or management—jobs that benefit from years of hands-on experience but don’t require being under a car for a living. Those roles also benefit Ford via knowledge retention, and will reassure potential recruits that there’s a long-term future for them. The work may be tough by nature, but a tough job does not have to come with a short shelf life.

A lot of companies find that such a strategy leads to better retention and higher productivity that can even bring costs down. But if it means the price of a transmission repair goes up, then that’s what one should cost and how the market is supposed to work. You don’t even want to know what a month from a consulting team costs, but people pay it. One suspects that Farley himself has procured such services, and paid the going rate.

Ultimately, it is not enough to dangle $160,000 as a light at the end of the tunnel and then wonder why workers don’t show up in droves when the journey getting there is so perilous and the payoff so uncertain. In an economy where physical work, the manufacture and repair of real things, is as critical as ever, stability and credible paths for advancement are not luxuries; they are prerequisites for recruitment and retention.

It should come as no surprise, then, that headlines increasingly feature worker shortages, lost expertise, and products that cannot be built well or on time, whether in auto repair, shipbuilding, or munitions manufacturing. These outcomes are not mysterious. They are the predictable result of neglected and devalued employees. “I wish we could clone Ted,” his boss laments to the Wall Street Journal. I’ve got a simpler idea: just treat him like a management consultant.