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Do what we used to do. Pay them more. 120k is like 60k in mid 1990s money. And, pay for their education. Invest in local colleges to help guide curriculum in

Do what we used to do. Pay them more. 120k is like 60k in mid 1990s money. And, pay for their education. Invest in local colleges to help guide curriculum in what you need. That’s what defense contractors and mega corps do / have done. Stop complaining and be stewards of your community. Like Henry Ford argued back in the day, “I want my employees to be able to buy a Ford”. Invest and the people will invest back.

paulpauper 11mo ago
Why not pay them 300k/year? 500k? It has to be viable or worthwhile for both parties
- mapontosevenths 11mo ago
  > Why not pay them 300k/year? 500k? That's a great idea! We could take the difference from the CEO's pay.
  - vitaflo 11mo ago
    Congrats you just bought yourself 10 mechanics.
    - shtzvhdx 11mo ago
      The SEC requires companies to disclose the executive pay to median salary. It 2023 it was 312:1. Ok, but $500 000/year isnt a median salary. But Ford's CEO is $26.4 million, so 53:1. Gather up the rest of the C-suit at Ford and you got a couple hundred mechanics. Do that to Stellantis and GM and you're at about 500 mechanics. 10 per state is not an insignificant number of high paid mechanics. Add Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed, GE, and all the other once great industrial American jewels run by idiots and you have financed the training of a large portion of the American workforce.
      - xp84 11mo ago
        Except, now those companies have no leadership at all so just tell the workers to just do whatever seems like a good idea and hope for the best? Why haven't we seen a bunch of successful companies without any management if management is so useless/harmful? Just ICs self-organizing to run the whole business. Without any execs to pay they'd have a cost advantage running that way.
        mapontosevenths 11mo ago
        Why would they have no leadership at all? I suspect I can find a few willing to do it for a few paltry million, or maybe less.
        JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
        > suspect I can find a few willing to do it for a few paltry million Run an automotive giant? We're still in the thread where the argument for acquiring talent is to pay more, right?
        orwin 11mo ago
        'talent'. Talent here is very often having friends on the board, through common investments and co-ownership of those private jet/ luxury yacht/luxury hostel rentals that operates 'at a loss' (you only pay consumption taxes on your direct spending, if the company rent you the plane for the cost of kerosene, and you pay yearly through your holdings for fixed costs, you avoid a lot of taxes. Tips from a friend who works at one of those places).
        JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
        > Talent here is very often having friends on the board And the customers' boards and management teams. And the suppliers'. And the regulators' and electeds'.
        11mo ago
    - hobs 11mo ago
      Say we pay them 1 million dollars instead of (googled) 25 million dollars. If we increase the compensation by another 60 thousand dollars a year that gives us room for 400 additional mechanics. The stock price of Ford might even go up if you could improve the repair situation.
      - Esophagus4 11mo ago
        Who is “we?” Who in this situation should decide to pay the CEO less? Is it regulators? The board? Shareholders? I’m trying to understand your model for how executive compensation should be set.
      - vitaflo 11mo ago
        He’s already only paid $1.6m in salary. Over $20m of his compensation is in stock. Someone else is paying him when they purchase his shares not Ford.
    - bryanrasmussen 11mo ago
      total compensation for Ford CEO is 24.9 million. But obviously it doesn't need to work that it is just taken from his money. I propose that if the money for mechanics is needed, it can be gotten by redirecting capital from other parts of the system to invest in mechanics, funny that math is the subject here because this redirecting of capital could even be thought of a mathematical process, although really more a number of related processes together, I shall call these processes that control how money will be moved to handle problems in the systems that exist to generate more money "Capitalism". In the rest of my work I shall discuss how the processes that control circulation of money will lead to its accumulation and conversion to power among a subset of power, allowing them to over time amass more and more power, I will note the problems this will imply but not really offer a solution as my primary interest is in describing the ways that need for a thing will cause the investment in that thing to rise over time, and decrease thereby investment in other things, as though the whole were an impartial and, as noted, nearly mathematical process in its elegance.
      - mapontosevenths 11mo ago
        Your implied theory only applies to actual free market capitalism. Most/many CEO's don't get the gig thanks to an efficient market or being the best. There are others equally or better qualified who would do the job for much less. The typical justification for their high salaries is that it encourages the rest of the executives to buck harder for the role. In practice, far less pay could achieve that goal.
        bryanrasmussen 11mo ago
        your inferred theory does not seem to match up with the things I was implying, for example you seem to think I was saying something about the Ford CEO deserving the money they make in some way?
        mapontosevenths 11mo ago
        I think I missed your point. Mea culpa.
    - nixosbestos 11mo ago
      So are you out of touch with CEO comp packages, or are you also bad at math? (In case you or someone else needs to hear it, ain't no CEO ain't gonna fuck ya for defending CEO's excessive compensation in the Hacker News comments. What a weird thing to do.)
      - vitaflo 11mo ago
        Go look at their actual compensation package and get back to me. Unless you want to pay everyone in stock instead of cash you aren’t saving any money.
        nixosbestos 11mo ago
        30,000,000 / 30,000. Hope you can find a calculator to help you with that challenging math. I know it gets hard with such big numbers! (kinda the point, here!)
        vitaflo 11mo ago
        If you don’t want to actually pay attention that’s fine.
  - JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
    > We could take the difference from the CEO's pay This is California going after golf courses to solve its water problem. Ford spends about $3bn a year on dividends [1]. That's a quarter of their entire SG&A. [1] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/37996/000003799625000186/f-20250930.htm#i7d32f188887143d381199a84083a36c8_16 https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/37996/000003...
    - mapontosevenths 11mo ago
      Dividends provide value to the shareholders. Propping up the good old boys network by overpaying for executive talent is of negative utility to the shareholders.
      - JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
        > Propping up the good old boys network by overpaying for executive talent is of negative utility to the shareholders We don't really have evidence executives are overpaid. The fact that even cheapskate private company owners wind up paying their executives well should communicate something about what's going on.
        mapontosevenths 11mo ago
        There is a boatload of evidence. It's been studied repeatedly. Most of it shows that there is a small but real link between CEO pay and stock performance. This works best when CEO pay is tied directly to performance, and it isn't tied to the specific dollar value just the percentage of increase. IE - The $40m CEO doesn't actually outperform the $20m CEO, but a CEO who oversees a big jump in profits will see a big raise regardless of the reason. CEO pay DOES correlate strongly with luck. IE - They get rewarded with big bonuses when the larger market does well or taxes go down, and they don't tend to get smaller pay when the market does poorly.
        JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
        > this works best when CEO pay is tied directly to performance, and it isn't tied to the specific dollar value just the percentage of increase This is the line the executive compensation industry peddles. It has elements of truth. But it's not from an unbiased source. Again, there are lots of companies and lots of CEOs. That nobody has unlocked this arbitrage strongly suggests the simple story isn't the whole one.
- solomonb 11mo ago
  They (and everyone else) should be paid the maximum amount the company can afford to pay while still being sustainable.
  - vineyardmike 11mo ago
    And if that’s too little, the company should go under and make room for a company with the cash flow to pay people a salary high enough to accept the job offer.
  - solomonb 11mo ago
    I would like to expand and add a little nuance to my statement as apparently it was controversial. From wikipedia: > Business is the practice of making one's living or making money by producing or buying and selling products (such as goods and services). It is also "any activity or enterprise entered into for profit." So a business is an activity or enterprise engaged in by people for profit. If a business exists to generate profit for its participants, it should maximize profit distribution to everyone involved in that business. This implies salary limits that maintain business sustainability. Otherwise, excessive compensation would eliminate profit for all participants. My point wasn't about how to balance salaries between different employees. I'm arguing that companies should maximize compensation for all employees (at every level) to the extent that doing so doesn't threaten the business's viability. Without this, you get companies hoarding excessive capital reserves that sit idle rather than circulating through the economy.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 11mo ago
  You raise a valid point that doesn't deserve the downvoting... But have you considered it fully? We're in a heap of shit if the pay that employers can truly afford is lower than the pay that employees require to earn the minimal livelihood. If there is really realsy no overlap there, then you need to stock up on canned food and shotgun shells.
mhb 11mo ago
We used to be able to assume that high school and college graduates could do elementary school math. Maybe what we used to do would be more palatable if we weren't pissing away money on dysfunctional public education.
- paulpauper 11mo ago
  From what I have read online, failing high school is almost impossible. GPAs inflated to the point of useless.
  - cpursley 11mo ago
    My wife was a Title I teacher high school for a while, there was a LOT of pressure to “pass” kids out of the system for that sweet Federal money and other lets say, “political” reasons (like internal/local level, not left/right stuff). And she absolutely did her best to get them to pass on their own merit, but there’s only so much you can do if students don’t have the prerequisites + culture and motivation.
  - SonOfKyuss 11mo ago
    > From what I have read online... Don't believe everything you read online. My experience from actually having 2 kids currently in high school is that failing is damn near impossible, but GPA absolutely does mean something for most kids. There is definitely a group of kids at the bottom that in decades past would have been held back or dropped out and those kids are now just passed along. Is that better or worse than having them drop out? I don't really know, but the reality is that those kids likely wouldn't have been cut out for these jobs anyway. At the other end of the spectrum, the competition at the top can be fierce. My kids and their peers stress way more about their GPA than I ever did because competition for colleges has gotten tougher. The education is there for those who want to take advantage of it.
    - JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
      > Is that better or worse than having them drop out? I don't really know It's worse. If they'd been held back earlier, they might have graduated high school prepared for the sorts of trades jobs this article discusses. Instead, they're processed through the system as a number. Best case, they aren't constantly disrupting their classrooms.
darth_avocado 11mo ago
Another thing I’ve heard is that Ford is terrible at designing maintainable cars and mechanics lose money working on them because Ford doesn’t accurately represent the time it takes to fix something. It was akin to replacing the gasket requires them to pick the engine apart and rebuild it, while Ford only pays them for an hour of labor. I can’t find the exact video at the moment but the reality is that even if Ford paid $120k, you’d probably be working 80 hours a week.
- GenerWork 11mo ago
  >mechanics lose money working on them because Ford doesn’t accurately represent the time it takes to fix something I believe this is mainly for warranty or recall work. If it's out of warranty, then the charges can be much higher. It also depends on the difficulty of the work being done. I had my Mustangs rear diff seal replaced under warranty, and I guarantee you that doing that wasn't that bad in terms of pay or time taken.
  - queenkjuul 11mo ago
    If you're a mechanic employed by Ford, your gonna be doing mostly warranty and recall work
    - t-writescode 11mo ago
      And you shouldn't be being paid fake rates. You should be being paid *at least* your worked hours. Playing otherwise is, I would argue, theft. So 40 hours a week plus whatever overtime you would earn.
- imgabe 11mo ago
  It sounds like this is the actual problem and instead of paying exorbitant salaries or fixing the entire US education system Ford just needs to face reality and accept how long repairs actually take and pay for that time. That and/or redesign their cars to take less time to repair.
2OEH8eoCRo0 11mo ago
How come Henry Ford could do this but modern companies cannot? I've only seen Electric Boat do this (defense contractor) and it's likely because the govt pays for it!
- fooker 11mo ago
  Because it takes a lot more education to work at a modern factory than what it took in 1930. The rest of the world has kept up. Even if you could hypothetically cram 12 years of education into six months of training, the kind of mental effort required to go through that training would be quite impossible for the average person. But why do that when it’s so much easier to blame AI or immigration, or whatever the new boogeyman of the day is.
- t-writescode 11mo ago
  "Can't" and "Won't" are two different things.
theideaofcoffee 11mo ago
“We can’t possibly afford to do this. It doesn’t make sense! What if we pay for all of this training and they leave?” “What if you don’t and they stay?” These companies think they can just reap all of the rewards without any investment, it’s stupid. I definitely agree with you saying that there needs to be a return to these places taking more care and investing in long-term people. Like you said, invest in them and they’ll invest in you.
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
  > What if we pay for all of this training and they leave?” This is a solved problem. If they quit early, they owe the cost of the education.
bagacrap 11mo ago
Where do you find the pay for [Ford] auto mechanics in 1995?
- t-writescode 11mo ago
  https://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/financial/salary-inflation-calculator.php https://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/financial/salary-... I did the math in my head based on something I saw someone else share earlier today; but I was probably a bit off. Putting in 120k on this website for this year turns into about 58k in 1995
  - bagacrap 11mo ago
    I'm not asking about cumulative inflation since 1995. I'm asking how you know we used to pay auto mechanics more in real dollars than we do today.
SilentM68 11mo ago
I agree with your statement, for the most part. Investing in community college programs is one route since they are essentially a business. The main problem with the CCs is that they are very corrupt, have been issuing students worthless degrees. Essentially, the graduates don't have marketable skills. The colleges' goal is reaching a "graduation quota," and not "employability." Another way to go is adult and high school education, i.e. the old auto shop classes that are currently very hard to find. This goes for any other trade, such as Drafting, Welding, as well not just auto shop. So, yea, companies should pay more and invest in education, rather than bitch and complain about the lack of fully train workers. Sol Roth
- Moto7451 11mo ago
  Community Colleges being considered corrupt is not an accusation I’ve heard. Is there something behind this or are you grouping them with the issues seen with Public Universities and grants/loans fueling spiraling tuition? The Community College I went to was about $20 per unit and offered a great education. Currently they’re $46 per unit. The instructors worked in the industry and were sharper than my 200 level University course instructors I paid $100 per unit for the year after my Associates Degree. I went to University as the Great Recession happened and had to go back to Community College as financial markets melted (and some life events happened) and that Associates Degree and an additional quarter of a Bachelors has served me well. I got my first job in software through a Community College affiliated internship, hopped to a Startup, and after a lot of years in between I’m on here musing with the rest of the industry. There are certainly “Extension” or non Trades “Certificate Only” programs but when looking at LinkedIn’s Alumni view they’ve minted a lot of Solar Techs, Electricians, and Building Engineers. I took Electronics courses as an elective with the PV guys and it was a lot of fun and seems rather profitable for that cohort. Ergo, I’m genuinely curious to know if this has been derailed in some way at large. Do you have any links to news on this?
  - SilentM68 11mo ago
    As I am no longer in the business of higher ed, I do not have any links but do have work experience at the CC level as well as an Associate, though no BS. The reason you don't see accusations is because it is kept on the downlow by the powers that be. I can say that in the time that I spent working at a particular CC, multiple CC presidents were kicked out for diverting funds into their private bank accounts. They were hired even after it was known that they got kicked out of other previous CCs. Millions of dollars in Financian Aid fraud was an issue in one state, in particular by fake Ghost Students enrolling only for the Financial Aid. Here's a link to that story: https://www.opencampus.org/2025/06/16/financial-aid-fraud-is-on-the-rise-in-california-how-federal-officials-plan-to-crack-down/ https://www.opencampus.org/2025/06/16/financial-aid-fraud-is... The administrators tend to be overpaid, half of the degrees that are offered are useless, mine included. Why are they useless, because there will never be sufficient employment for the graduates. Even knowing this economic reality, the college admins still insist on having the main goal as "graduation," not "employability." In my view, only auto, nursing, medical subjects and other practical trades guarantee employment, and thus are worth the $46 per unit as you put it. Please note that at one time, CCs were free, in the state that I reside in, though I myself went to school when the cost was $15 per unit. You should check out this link to take a look at the outrageous salaries that a lot of administrators generate: https://transparentcalifornia.com/ https://transparentcalifornia.com/ The problem with this is that the various student department and programs get a disproportionate allocation of the funds, with some getting the bulk, and others getting just a tiny slice of the budget that the office of education provides. Here's a simple example of the news that never gets carried by mainstream media. In last November 2024 Election, in California, for example, there were various measures which passed, that forced communities to pay taxes to pay for Community College expansions and repairs. People don't realize that in one school in particular the same thing was done some years or so before, and the money was mysteriously mishandled. This is a common occurrence in that state, for example. http://www.bigbadbonds.com/CALBONDS/ballot-argument-referral.cfm?y=2024&e=General&c=Los_Angeles&m=V http://www.bigbadbonds.com/CALBONDS/ballot-argument-referral... This has been the status quo prior to Trump. The federal funds have had a tendency to disappear. I noticed you used LinkedIn as a reference above, but it has its own issues with Fraud, aka Ghost Jobs posts and fake scammers offering users jobs that don't exist. I myself got approached by one and reported it LinkedIn support. In my view, LinkedIn is just another scam site that posts fake jobs just to lure people into purchasing their Pro subscription. I get that message and reminder every single day, so I disabled most notifications and don't use LinkedIn as a job search engine, anymore. Apologies, way too long of a response and I need to have some Soylent Green. Regards, Sol Roth
JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
> pay for their education. Invest in local colleges to help guide curriculum in what you need I get that we're still pretending EVs don't exist in America. But could the dearth of internal combustion mechanics be explained as an obselescence rent [1]? [1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w31743 https://www.nber.org/papers/w31743

paulpauper 11mo ago

Why not pay them 300k/year? 500k? It has to be viable or worthwhile for both parties

mapontosevenths 11mo ago
> Why not pay them 300k/year? 500k? That's a great idea! We could take the difference from the CEO's pay.
- vitaflo 11mo ago
  Congrats you just bought yourself 10 mechanics.
  - shtzvhdx 11mo ago
    The SEC requires companies to disclose the executive pay to median salary. It 2023 it was 312:1. Ok, but $500 000/year isnt a median salary. But Ford's CEO is $26.4 million, so 53:1. Gather up the rest of the C-suit at Ford and you got a couple hundred mechanics. Do that to Stellantis and GM and you're at about 500 mechanics. 10 per state is not an insignificant number of high paid mechanics. Add Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed, GE, and all the other once great industrial American jewels run by idiots and you have financed the training of a large portion of the American workforce.
    - xp84 11mo ago
      Except, now those companies have no leadership at all so just tell the workers to just do whatever seems like a good idea and hope for the best? Why haven't we seen a bunch of successful companies without any management if management is so useless/harmful? Just ICs self-organizing to run the whole business. Without any execs to pay they'd have a cost advantage running that way.
      - mapontosevenths 11mo ago
        Why would they have no leadership at all? I suspect I can find a few willing to do it for a few paltry million, or maybe less.
        JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
        > suspect I can find a few willing to do it for a few paltry million Run an automotive giant? We're still in the thread where the argument for acquiring talent is to pay more, right?
        orwin 11mo ago
        'talent'. Talent here is very often having friends on the board, through common investments and co-ownership of those private jet/ luxury yacht/luxury hostel rentals that operates 'at a loss' (you only pay consumption taxes on your direct spending, if the company rent you the plane for the cost of kerosene, and you pay yearly through your holdings for fixed costs, you avoid a lot of taxes. Tips from a friend who works at one of those places).
        JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
        > Talent here is very often having friends on the board And the customers' boards and management teams. And the suppliers'. And the regulators' and electeds'.
        11mo ago
  - hobs 11mo ago
    Say we pay them 1 million dollars instead of (googled) 25 million dollars. If we increase the compensation by another 60 thousand dollars a year that gives us room for 400 additional mechanics. The stock price of Ford might even go up if you could improve the repair situation.
    - Esophagus4 11mo ago
      Who is “we?” Who in this situation should decide to pay the CEO less? Is it regulators? The board? Shareholders? I’m trying to understand your model for how executive compensation should be set.
    - vitaflo 11mo ago
      He’s already only paid $1.6m in salary. Over $20m of his compensation is in stock. Someone else is paying him when they purchase his shares not Ford.
  - bryanrasmussen 11mo ago
    total compensation for Ford CEO is 24.9 million. But obviously it doesn't need to work that it is just taken from his money. I propose that if the money for mechanics is needed, it can be gotten by redirecting capital from other parts of the system to invest in mechanics, funny that math is the subject here because this redirecting of capital could even be thought of a mathematical process, although really more a number of related processes together, I shall call these processes that control how money will be moved to handle problems in the systems that exist to generate more money "Capitalism". In the rest of my work I shall discuss how the processes that control circulation of money will lead to its accumulation and conversion to power among a subset of power, allowing them to over time amass more and more power, I will note the problems this will imply but not really offer a solution as my primary interest is in describing the ways that need for a thing will cause the investment in that thing to rise over time, and decrease thereby investment in other things, as though the whole were an impartial and, as noted, nearly mathematical process in its elegance.
    - mapontosevenths 11mo ago
      Your implied theory only applies to actual free market capitalism. Most/many CEO's don't get the gig thanks to an efficient market or being the best. There are others equally or better qualified who would do the job for much less. The typical justification for their high salaries is that it encourages the rest of the executives to buck harder for the role. In practice, far less pay could achieve that goal.
      - bryanrasmussen 11mo ago
        your inferred theory does not seem to match up with the things I was implying, for example you seem to think I was saying something about the Ford CEO deserving the money they make in some way?
        mapontosevenths 11mo ago
        I think I missed your point. Mea culpa.
  - nixosbestos 11mo ago
    So are you out of touch with CEO comp packages, or are you also bad at math? (In case you or someone else needs to hear it, ain't no CEO ain't gonna fuck ya for defending CEO's excessive compensation in the Hacker News comments. What a weird thing to do.)
    - vitaflo 11mo ago
      Go look at their actual compensation package and get back to me. Unless you want to pay everyone in stock instead of cash you aren’t saving any money.
      - nixosbestos 11mo ago
        30,000,000 / 30,000. Hope you can find a calculator to help you with that challenging math. I know it gets hard with such big numbers! (kinda the point, here!)
        vitaflo 11mo ago
        If you don’t want to actually pay attention that’s fine.
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
  > We could take the difference from the CEO's pay This is California going after golf courses to solve its water problem. Ford spends about $3bn a year on dividends [1]. That's a quarter of their entire SG&A. [1] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/37996/000003799625000186/f-20250930.htm#i7d32f188887143d381199a84083a36c8_16 https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/37996/000003...
  - mapontosevenths 11mo ago
    Dividends provide value to the shareholders. Propping up the good old boys network by overpaying for executive talent is of negative utility to the shareholders.
    - JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
      > Propping up the good old boys network by overpaying for executive talent is of negative utility to the shareholders We don't really have evidence executives are overpaid. The fact that even cheapskate private company owners wind up paying their executives well should communicate something about what's going on.
      - mapontosevenths 11mo ago
        There is a boatload of evidence. It's been studied repeatedly. Most of it shows that there is a small but real link between CEO pay and stock performance. This works best when CEO pay is tied directly to performance, and it isn't tied to the specific dollar value just the percentage of increase. IE - The $40m CEO doesn't actually outperform the $20m CEO, but a CEO who oversees a big jump in profits will see a big raise regardless of the reason. CEO pay DOES correlate strongly with luck. IE - They get rewarded with big bonuses when the larger market does well or taxes go down, and they don't tend to get smaller pay when the market does poorly.
        JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
        > this works best when CEO pay is tied directly to performance, and it isn't tied to the specific dollar value just the percentage of increase This is the line the executive compensation industry peddles. It has elements of truth. But it's not from an unbiased source. Again, there are lots of companies and lots of CEOs. That nobody has unlocked this arbitrage strongly suggests the simple story isn't the whole one.
solomonb 11mo ago
They (and everyone else) should be paid the maximum amount the company can afford to pay while still being sustainable.
- vineyardmike 11mo ago
  And if that’s too little, the company should go under and make room for a company with the cash flow to pay people a salary high enough to accept the job offer.
- solomonb 11mo ago
  I would like to expand and add a little nuance to my statement as apparently it was controversial. From wikipedia: > Business is the practice of making one's living or making money by producing or buying and selling products (such as goods and services). It is also "any activity or enterprise entered into for profit." So a business is an activity or enterprise engaged in by people for profit. If a business exists to generate profit for its participants, it should maximize profit distribution to everyone involved in that business. This implies salary limits that maintain business sustainability. Otherwise, excessive compensation would eliminate profit for all participants. My point wasn't about how to balance salaries between different employees. I'm arguing that companies should maximize compensation for all employees (at every level) to the extent that doing so doesn't threaten the business's viability. Without this, you get companies hoarding excessive capital reserves that sit idle rather than circulating through the economy.
NoMoreNicksLeft 11mo ago
You raise a valid point that doesn't deserve the downvoting... But have you considered it fully? We're in a heap of shit if the pay that employers can truly afford is lower than the pay that employees require to earn the minimal livelihood. If there is really realsy no overlap there, then you need to stock up on canned food and shotgun shells.

mhb 11mo ago

We used to be able to assume that high school and college graduates could do elementary school math. Maybe what we used to do would be more palatable if we weren't pissing away money on dysfunctional public education.

paulpauper 11mo ago
From what I have read online, failing high school is almost impossible. GPAs inflated to the point of useless.
- cpursley 11mo ago
  My wife was a Title I teacher high school for a while, there was a LOT of pressure to “pass” kids out of the system for that sweet Federal money and other lets say, “political” reasons (like internal/local level, not left/right stuff). And she absolutely did her best to get them to pass on their own merit, but there’s only so much you can do if students don’t have the prerequisites + culture and motivation.
- SonOfKyuss 11mo ago
  > From what I have read online... Don't believe everything you read online. My experience from actually having 2 kids currently in high school is that failing is damn near impossible, but GPA absolutely does mean something for most kids. There is definitely a group of kids at the bottom that in decades past would have been held back or dropped out and those kids are now just passed along. Is that better or worse than having them drop out? I don't really know, but the reality is that those kids likely wouldn't have been cut out for these jobs anyway. At the other end of the spectrum, the competition at the top can be fierce. My kids and their peers stress way more about their GPA than I ever did because competition for colleges has gotten tougher. The education is there for those who want to take advantage of it.
  - JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
    > Is that better or worse than having them drop out? I don't really know It's worse. If they'd been held back earlier, they might have graduated high school prepared for the sorts of trades jobs this article discusses. Instead, they're processed through the system as a number. Best case, they aren't constantly disrupting their classrooms.

darth_avocado 11mo ago

Another thing I’ve heard is that Ford is terrible at designing maintainable cars and mechanics lose money working on them because Ford doesn’t accurately represent the time it takes to fix something. It was akin to replacing the gasket requires them to pick the engine apart and rebuild it, while Ford only pays them for an hour of labor. I can’t find the exact video at the moment but the reality is that even if Ford paid $120k, you’d probably be working 80 hours a week.

GenerWork 11mo ago
>mechanics lose money working on them because Ford doesn’t accurately represent the time it takes to fix something I believe this is mainly for warranty or recall work. If it's out of warranty, then the charges can be much higher. It also depends on the difficulty of the work being done. I had my Mustangs rear diff seal replaced under warranty, and I guarantee you that doing that wasn't that bad in terms of pay or time taken.
- queenkjuul 11mo ago
  If you're a mechanic employed by Ford, your gonna be doing mostly warranty and recall work
  - t-writescode 11mo ago
    And you shouldn't be being paid fake rates. You should be being paid *at least* your worked hours. Playing otherwise is, I would argue, theft. So 40 hours a week plus whatever overtime you would earn.
imgabe 11mo ago
It sounds like this is the actual problem and instead of paying exorbitant salaries or fixing the entire US education system Ford just needs to face reality and accept how long repairs actually take and pay for that time. That and/or redesign their cars to take less time to repair.

2OEH8eoCRo0 11mo ago

How come Henry Ford could do this but modern companies cannot? I've only seen Electric Boat do this (defense contractor) and it's likely because the govt pays for it!

fooker 11mo ago
Because it takes a lot more education to work at a modern factory than what it took in 1930. The rest of the world has kept up. Even if you could hypothetically cram 12 years of education into six months of training, the kind of mental effort required to go through that training would be quite impossible for the average person. But why do that when it’s so much easier to blame AI or immigration, or whatever the new boogeyman of the day is.
t-writescode 11mo ago
"Can't" and "Won't" are two different things.

theideaofcoffee 11mo ago

“We can’t possibly afford to do this. It doesn’t make sense! What if we pay for all of this training and they leave?” “What if you don’t and they stay?” These companies think they can just reap all of the rewards without any investment, it’s stupid. I definitely agree with you saying that there needs to be a return to these places taking more care and investing in long-term people. Like you said, invest in them and they’ll invest in you.

JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
> What if we pay for all of this training and they leave?” This is a solved problem. If they quit early, they owe the cost of the education.

bagacrap 11mo ago

Where do you find the pay for [Ford] auto mechanics in 1995?

t-writescode 11mo ago
https://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/financial/salary-inflation-calculator.php https://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/financial/salary-... I did the math in my head based on something I saw someone else share earlier today; but I was probably a bit off. Putting in 120k on this website for this year turns into about 58k in 1995
- bagacrap 11mo ago
  I'm not asking about cumulative inflation since 1995. I'm asking how you know we used to pay auto mechanics more in real dollars than we do today.

SilentM68 11mo ago

I agree with your statement, for the most part. Investing in community college programs is one route since they are essentially a business. The main problem with the CCs is that they are very corrupt, have been issuing students worthless degrees. Essentially, the graduates don't have marketable skills. The colleges' goal is reaching a "graduation quota," and not "employability." Another way to go is adult and high school education, i.e. the old auto shop classes that are currently very hard to find. This goes for any other trade, such as Drafting, Welding, as well not just auto shop. So, yea, companies should pay more and invest in education, rather than bitch and complain about the lack of fully train workers. Sol Roth

Moto7451 11mo ago
Community Colleges being considered corrupt is not an accusation I’ve heard. Is there something behind this or are you grouping them with the issues seen with Public Universities and grants/loans fueling spiraling tuition? The Community College I went to was about $20 per unit and offered a great education. Currently they’re $46 per unit. The instructors worked in the industry and were sharper than my 200 level University course instructors I paid $100 per unit for the year after my Associates Degree. I went to University as the Great Recession happened and had to go back to Community College as financial markets melted (and some life events happened) and that Associates Degree and an additional quarter of a Bachelors has served me well. I got my first job in software through a Community College affiliated internship, hopped to a Startup, and after a lot of years in between I’m on here musing with the rest of the industry. There are certainly “Extension” or non Trades “Certificate Only” programs but when looking at LinkedIn’s Alumni view they’ve minted a lot of Solar Techs, Electricians, and Building Engineers. I took Electronics courses as an elective with the PV guys and it was a lot of fun and seems rather profitable for that cohort. Ergo, I’m genuinely curious to know if this has been derailed in some way at large. Do you have any links to news on this?
- SilentM68 11mo ago
  As I am no longer in the business of higher ed, I do not have any links but do have work experience at the CC level as well as an Associate, though no BS. The reason you don't see accusations is because it is kept on the downlow by the powers that be. I can say that in the time that I spent working at a particular CC, multiple CC presidents were kicked out for diverting funds into their private bank accounts. They were hired even after it was known that they got kicked out of other previous CCs. Millions of dollars in Financian Aid fraud was an issue in one state, in particular by fake Ghost Students enrolling only for the Financial Aid. Here's a link to that story: https://www.opencampus.org/2025/06/16/financial-aid-fraud-is-on-the-rise-in-california-how-federal-officials-plan-to-crack-down/ https://www.opencampus.org/2025/06/16/financial-aid-fraud-is... The administrators tend to be overpaid, half of the degrees that are offered are useless, mine included. Why are they useless, because there will never be sufficient employment for the graduates. Even knowing this economic reality, the college admins still insist on having the main goal as "graduation," not "employability." In my view, only auto, nursing, medical subjects and other practical trades guarantee employment, and thus are worth the $46 per unit as you put it. Please note that at one time, CCs were free, in the state that I reside in, though I myself went to school when the cost was $15 per unit. You should check out this link to take a look at the outrageous salaries that a lot of administrators generate: https://transparentcalifornia.com/ https://transparentcalifornia.com/ The problem with this is that the various student department and programs get a disproportionate allocation of the funds, with some getting the bulk, and others getting just a tiny slice of the budget that the office of education provides. Here's a simple example of the news that never gets carried by mainstream media. In last November 2024 Election, in California, for example, there were various measures which passed, that forced communities to pay taxes to pay for Community College expansions and repairs. People don't realize that in one school in particular the same thing was done some years or so before, and the money was mysteriously mishandled. This is a common occurrence in that state, for example. http://www.bigbadbonds.com/CALBONDS/ballot-argument-referral.cfm?y=2024&e=General&c=Los_Angeles&m=V http://www.bigbadbonds.com/CALBONDS/ballot-argument-referral... This has been the status quo prior to Trump. The federal funds have had a tendency to disappear. I noticed you used LinkedIn as a reference above, but it has its own issues with Fraud, aka Ghost Jobs posts and fake scammers offering users jobs that don't exist. I myself got approached by one and reported it LinkedIn support. In my view, LinkedIn is just another scam site that posts fake jobs just to lure people into purchasing their Pro subscription. I get that message and reminder every single day, so I disabled most notifications and don't use LinkedIn as a job search engine, anymore. Apologies, way too long of a response and I need to have some Soylent Green. Regards, Sol Roth

JumpCrisscross 11mo ago

> pay for their education. Invest in local colleges to help guide curriculum in what you need I get that we're still pretending EVs don't exist in America. But could the dearth of internal combustion mechanics be explained as an obselescence rent [1]? [1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w31743 https://www.nber.org/papers/w31743