Comment 38341

By 1+1 (anonymous) | Posted February 22, 2010 at 16:26:02

Okay Mr. Mitchell, but let's also add in the costs to upgrade sewers and treatment plants and maintain the highway services and the new sprawling services and compare that to the cost of attracting a new plant to an already serviced brownfield.

But this crap can go on forever. The road's built and it is good to finally have a tenant on the properties it was supposedly built to service, and forget about the DeSantis press release about building Canada's largest new housing survey up in that region in the interim. That was just happy coincidence.

As for wages etc. I don't see high paying assembly line work returning to North America in any significant way anytime soon. Even with the billions spent to keep the big auto companies going here it is recognized that they are downsizing. UAW and CAW have had to negotiate lower wages into the mix, not higher. If for some reason manufacturing were to return from low-wage countries I think you would find the North American plants they return to would rely on greater automation and technology to reduce the amount of human labour going into each product. Even higher skilled job wages have to compete with robotics for jobs. That's going to be a problem for low wage countries hoping to improve living standards in the future too.

Employment trends are toward service industries, jobs that aren't easily shifted out of country. With higher rates of unemployment it's going to be difficult to raise those wages. Legislated higher minimum wages may be the only alternative.

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