this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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You can't just focus on number of workers. You need to take into account the productivity of the workers as well. A farm that's entirely sown and reaped by hand could have 100 workers compared to another farm that has 5 workers with machinery, and yet the one with fewer workers could produce more food and value. It'd be wrong to say the farm with 5 workers is in a dire state just because of their low worker count.
Wikipedia has a list of countries by productivity of workers. While it's not focused on manufacturing specifically, the US has some of the most productive workers in the world and is significantly ahead of Canada. We likely have more workers per capita because each worker is less productive.
Anecdotally, I work at a Canadian manufacturing plant that's owned by an American company. The machines in our plant are from the early 2000s and there's a lot of stuff still done by hand. I've heard the US plants have the most cutting edge machines and produce 2 to 3 times as much product that we do in a day. Apparently, the only reason why the company has not gotten rid of our machines and turned the plant into a warehouse is because they pay Canadian workers comparatively less than their US workers. While the Canadian factories aren't producing nearly as much as their American ones, the cost per unit ends up being less due to lower worker wages.
Pesky things like labour laws and workers rights, as well as stronger unions, tend to get in the way of important metrics like GDP/hr.
Not really, it's just that no one invests in Canada. I don't have a full story as to why, but the data points directly to a low investment rate into technology in Canada. It's super shitty and I'm sure someone is profiting from the money that would have been invested.
Yeah - as an example. FIL works white collar job in a company with plants in 3 Ontario cities and 1 in Michigan doing CNC milling for huge parts (like oilsands trucks size). His company is unionized on the Caanda factories, and ununionized on the US side. They bought new CNC equipment, and it went to the US factory BECAUSE they can push employees more there. The union forces things like breaks into the schedule regardless of project status while the workers are forced to work through breaks on the US side regularly, or stay after hours to finish.
Thus the US production is better (and they get the equipment to bolster it further), but its directly at the cost of labour rights that the unions have fought for here.