Toyota has just decided to build a new plant in Canada rather than any of several eager states, each of which dangled lucrative incentive packages before the firm. The crucial factor in Toyota’s decision was the comparative lack of trainability of US workers. You can read the story here.
We keep hearing all the time about how it’s so vital to the country that we get more and more students through college, but here’s solid evidence that our educational problem is deep in the K-12 system. Toyota thinks (with good reason) that it’s too costly to train US workers to do the tasks that are necessary in a factory. That’s a telling indictment of public education in the US.
What Toyota and most employers want is just people who are trainable. Alas, possession of a high school diploma or even a college degree doesn’t necessarily ensure that.
