Today the deep south; tomorrow all of America: an illiterate workforce

So it seems I'm doing a short series on employment in America this weekend. I suppose I'm a tad early; this really ought to wait till Labor Day, but I suspect that there'll be plenty to talk about by then as well.

Toyota has decided to build a plant to build the RAV-4 mini SUV in Ontario instead of in the U.S. Why? Because other carmakers' experience with workers in their two plants in Mississippi and Alabama (=ahem=) has been that said workers are "untrained - and often illiterate," and that health care costs in the U.S. are prohibitive.

The plant will produce the RAV-4, dubbed by some as a "mini sport-utility vehicle" that Toyota currently makes only in Japan. It plans to build 100,000 vehicles annually.

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.

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.

"Most people don't think of our health-care system as being a competitive advantage," he said.

States like Alabama and Mississippi are being held up to us in the Godless Northeast as the "real" America; the kind of Bible-adherin', God-fearin' America into which the theocrats want to turn the rest of the country. There's just one problem: When science classes teach that an invisible cloud being created the earth in six days and molded people out of clay; when education is the first thing to be cut so that taxes can remain low, when kids can be home-schooled by unqualified parents in order to keep them away from feminists, homosexuals, and secularists, well, you're going to have a workforce that may work cheap, but can't read and can't understand instructions. I have a hard time believing that this is good for the country.

Note also the impact of health care costs on companies' decisions whether to do business in the U.S. The Bush Administration thinks the way around that is to give people vouchers to buy overpriced health insurance in the present for-profit model, in which health insurance CEO's take home 7-digit compensation packages, not mentioning that such vouchers will cover maybe a tenth of the premiums. The bottom line here, folks, is that national health insurance is vital to keep this country competitive in terms of a place to do business.