Ford CEO Jim Farley is issuing a wake-up call to America: the country’s economic strength depends not just on the innovation hotspots of Silicon Valley, but on the everyday industries that get things “moved, built, or fixed.” In a series of recent commentaries and interviews, Farley has been highlighting the mounting crisis in the “essential economy”—sectors like manufacturing, skilled trades, and infrastructure—and outlines how automation and artificial intelligence threaten to upend the white-collar workforce while blue-collar fields face unprecedented shortages. In late August, he authored an op-ed for Yahoo Finance outlining ways to close the essential economy’s productivity gap.

Farley’s warning is twofold: as artificial intelligence rapidly advances, up to half of all white-col

See Full Page