WOODSTOCK, Ont. (CP) - Ontario workers are well-trained.Are schools in the South really that bad?That simple explanation was cited as a main reason why Toyota turned its back on hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies offered from several American states in favour of building a second Ontario plant.
Industry experts say Ontarians are easier and cheaper to train - helping make it more cost-efficient to train workers when the new Woodstock plant opens in 2008, 40 kilometres away from its skilled workforce in Cambridge.
"The level of the workforce in general is so high that the training program you need for people, even for people who have not worked in a Toyota plant before, is minimal compared to what you have to go through in the southeastern United States," said Gerry Fedchun, president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers' Association, whose members will see increased business with the new plant.
(snip)
The factory will cost $800 million to build, with the federal and provincial governments kicking in $125 million of that to help cover research, training and infrastructure costs.
Several U.S. states were reportedly prepared to offer more than double that amount of subsidy. But Fedchun said much of that extra money would have been eaten away by higher training costs than are necessary for the Woodstock project.
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.
Oh, and there's also this:
In addition to lower training costs, Canadian workers are also $4 to $5 cheaper to employ partly thanks to the taxpayer-funded health-care system in Canada, said federal Industry Minister David Emmerson.
5 comments:
plus they're all about gettin' stoned so that helps, or something...
It don't hurt. Wait, what were we talking about?
Workers with access to Tim Horton's Maple Donuts and fresh-brewed coffee are always going to be better than the average worker. Damn Canadians.
Look, we have to live with football that has 1 less down, cut us some slack.
its true. i worked at a company which is a supplier to Honda in Ontario, and at one point we sent some of our workers down to the Alabama plant to train them or something, and they sent some up here in exchange and the general consensus was that the Alabama workers were of poor quality, to put it nicely... maybe they couldn't handle our beer and canadian whiskey....
Post a Comment