Phil Carter points us to an article that quotes an auto industry insider’s explanation that Toyota opened a new plant in Canada instead of the U.S. because they found that training costs were lower in Canada.
He said Nissan and Honda have encountered difficulties getting new plants up to full production in recent years in Mississippi and Alabama due to an untrained - and often illiterate - workforce. In Alabama, trainers had to use “pictorials” to teach some illiterate workers how to use high-tech plant equipment.
“The educational level and the skill level of the people down there is so much lower than it is in Ontario,” Fedchun said.
Phil makes some good points, so you should go read. Then wonder whether education is worth funding.
There are few reasons, if any, that one can think education is only an issue for those with kids in the schools. The rest of us rely on the ancillary benefits of good education. Whether we want better/cheaper cars or more jobs for everyone so that crime and overall tax rates can go down, having a better educated populace makes all of that easier to achieve.
July 8th, 2005 at 9:31 am
Interesting article, it seems harder to get much cheaper than Mississippi or Alabama, but the illiteracy among immigrant workers is probably what is contributing to the dilemma that you speak of. Not too many Americans make it through the education system without becoming at least nominally literate. Canada can attribute a lot of their communications skills to the centuries of bilingual tradition.Interesting blog you have here though.
- Jersey Perspective
July 9th, 2005 at 11:48 am
Sorry Jack, but have you ever visited inner-city or very rural schools in America? Not to mention the fact that not everyone “make[s] it through” the U.S. school system. In fact, far too many drop out. (And legal immigrants to the U.S. are required to take a test, which requires literacy. As for illegal immigrants, well, the plants shouldn’t be hiring them “above board” in the first place, so I doubt that the article is referring to them…)
July 9th, 2005 at 11:16 pm
feeling snarky, Kim?
July 10th, 2005 at 10:31 pm
I’m permanently snarky nowadays.
July 10th, 2005 at 10:37 pm
and i thought life got better now that you moved to the big city…
July 11th, 2005 at 11:47 am
Just increases the number of uninformed people that I run into in a day.
July 27th, 2005 at 5:50 pm
Another take on this: Good teaching pictorials are harder to achieve than simply writing about them. Many companies write lousy how-to guides and then blame stupid workers for not understanding them.
Once, knowledge was passed along by apprenticeship. That kind of hands-on learning is largely gone, even though some blue-collar jobs require more sophisticated training than ever. It is certainly true that some workers are poorly educated (and that immigration is at least partly the cause). It is arguable whether they are “less educated than ever”. It is certain that employers need to take more responsibility for training their workers, in part by providing better training, and in part by rewarding well-trained workers by keeping them around. Expecting them to emerge from our (or any) school system with some kind of innate understanding of high-tech machinery is, to put it kindly, unreasonable.