Q: What happens when your state decides to disinvest in the public education that is supposed to prepare the state's children for the work force in their adult lives?
A: Companies like Toyota decide to go to Ontario, Canada, instead of your state, to hire 1,300 workers who can read.
If Toyota's decision this week to open a new plant in Ontario instead of Mississippi or Alabama, despite the states' offers of larger subsidies, isn't a wake-up call to the Oregon Legislature then I don't know what is. Toyota gave very specific reasons, that should come as no surprise, as to why the company chose Ontario:
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.
In other words, despite the huge subsidies Alabama and Mississippi were willing to offer, it still would have cost the company more to locate in one of those states:
Several U.S. states were reportedly prepared to offer more than double that amount of subsidy. But... much of that extra money would have been eaten away by higher training costs than are necessary for the Woodstock project.
...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.
And here's the cherry for this piece of cake:
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.
Can the issues of education funding and healthcare be any more simple than this? Are Oregonians willing to suffer the fates of red states like Alabama and Mississippi? I don't believe we are, but Speaker of the House Karen Minnis (R-Wood Village) and her fellow ditto-head Republican minions in the House seem dead-set on thwarting the necessary investment the state needs to make to avoid such a fate. Their ideology, which reflects that of the national Republican agenda rather than an independent state oriented one, will only lead us down the same wretched illiterate path that states like Republican dominated Alabama and Mississippi have chosen.
No thanks!
Please bombard Speaker Minnis with e-mails urging her to support Gov. Kulongoski's plan to fund Oregon's education system. Kulongoski stepping in this late in the game is another story...
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