Ford Motor Co. CEO Jim Farley called on U.S. companies to invest in skilled trades, manufacturing and other “essential economy” jobs in an effort to boost productivity and reduce reliance on China, as the Dearborn, Michigan, automaker has idled plants because of challenges in obtaining rare-earth materials from the Asian nation.

Ford will host a Ford Pro Accelerate summit this fall at Ford’s Michigan Central Station in Detroit on how to strengthen construction, service and maintenance, agriculture, energy and skilled trades industries.

It will gather business, government and technology leaders to address the shortage of workers in these industries and obstacles to growth in these sectors — many of whose businesses rely on Ford commercial vehicles.

“People do not realize how dependent we are as a country on making things in other countries. We cannot get any high power magnets without China,” Farley said recently at the Aspen Ideas Festival. “We shut down plants for the last three weeks, because you cannot get high-power magnets going into speaker audio systems, your seat motors, your wiper motors, your door holders. And we can’t make that.”

Rare earths describe 17 metallic elements with properties crucial for advanced technologies that are not uncommon, but often are found in places difficult to mine.

China effectively has had a monopoly on global heavy rare-earth elements processing and has major shares of processing for other rare earths.

The Chinese reliance, Farley said, underscores the importance of domestic manufacturing and the essential economy that he described as “everything that gets built or moved or fixed.”

It represents $12 trillion of economic activity in the United States and represents almost 100 million jobs, according to a report from the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit focused on finding solutions for societal challenges, and Ford.

“It’s really the backbone of our society,” Farley said.

White-collar productivity since 2017 has improved 28%, while that of the essential economy sectors has declined nearly 2%, according to the report. With technologies like artificial intelligence demanding more workers in energy, welding and heating, and ventilation and air-conditioning, the need for people to fill these roles increases.

“On a personal level, a cracked bridge or a blown transformer or an understaffed construction site, they have a huge impact on our daily lives,” Farley said, “and with so few filled jobs, this is going to be painfully expensive to fix when it all falls apart.”

In a LinkedIn post, Farley called for speeding up permitting processes, increasing spending on vocational training, leveraging robotics and augmented reality to help with these spaces and suggested an AmeriCorps-type program for these roles. He pointed to Germany’s apprenticeship program that exposes students as young as junior high school to enter the workforce for these jobs.

“Companies like Ford, other companies, academics or governments have to get really serious about investing in trade schools and skilled trades,” Farley said, adding that if the company wants to manufacture, “we better treat it with the respect it deserves. We haven’t.”

Tribune News Service