Where's James O'Connor When You Need Him?

Via Stay Free! Daily. Toyota announced:

Ontario workers are well-trained.

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....

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.

Hmmmm, let's see.... State education spending.... Infrastructure and other subsidies.... Healthcare.... Yep, that about covers it.

Just as an aside, this should make clear the venerable corporate liberal credentials of a single-payer healthcare system. As recently as Labor Day 2003, Dick Gephart's spokesman used competitiveness as one of the selling points of his proposed federal funding of health insurance. Gephart's proposed mandatory employer coverage, with a 60% tax credit for the cost, would (he said) eliminate competition from companies that don't currently provide health insurance as an employee benefit. It would also reduce competition from firms in countries with a single-payer system. Daniel Gross has made the same point, more generally, about big business support of government health insurance.

As the neo-Marxist James O'Connor described the process, "monopoly capital socializes more and more costs of production." Or in Murray Rothbard's words: "our corporate state uses the coercive taxing power either to accumulate corporate capital or to lower corporate costs" ["The Student Revolution"].

The phenomenon was described as long ago as 1912, in an issue of International Socialist Review. The capitalist realizes "that he can carry on certain portions of the production process more efficiently through his government than through private corporations..... Some muddleheads find that will be Socialism, but the capitalist knows better."