Ford CEO Jim Farley teams with Jamie Dimon on $2 billion initiative as he fears the ‘backbone of the American dream’ is crumbling

Ford CEO Jim Farley says America’s skilled-trades shortfall has become too large—and too varied by region and occupation—for any employer or state to solve on its own.

“Skilled trades are the backbone of our country and American manufacturing, and the backbone of the American dream,” Farley told media in remarks accompanying a new report from the Alliance for America’s Skilled Trades, adding that it’s personal for him, as his grandfather was a mechanic and his father grew up around cars. “No one company is going to solve this alone. It’s way too big of a problem,” he insisted.

The report is the first major public product of the Alliance for America’s Skilled Trades, the corporate coalition launched this summer by Ford, BlackRock, Google, and Carhartt, the formation of which was first reported by Fortune. The day before, Farley and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon announced Michigan LIFT (Launchpad for Industrial Innovation & Transformation), a $2 billion public-private initiative in which Ford aspires to award up to $1 billion in contracts to participating suppliers over the next decade, while the investment bank aspires to provide up to $1 billion in financing to suppliers.

Farley said there’s a lot of data on what he calls “the essential economy,” but it’s “scattered — and hard to compare. The Alliance is therefore launching the America’s Skilled Trades Dashboard, he said, a first-of-its-kind tool that brings it together in one place.

Dimon credited the city of........

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