[BobaFloutist]

Not that I think that protectionist economic policy is necessarily healthy, but if Stadler closed the plant tomorrow wouldn't we still presumably have some skilled workers that have been trained to do this kind of work? I don't think it's necessarily a huge or a lasting benefit, but if I wanted to open a plant the day after they closed theirs I'd probably look to do it in the same region, hoping to piggyback off of some of the expertise they established, no?

[bryananderson]

The way the Buy America rules work, there’s a certain percentage of work that has to be done in the US, and the rest can be done overseas. My understanding is that Stadler does most of the higher-skill work in Switzerland with its existing workforce, ships the components to Utah, and does final assembly there. Basically they do the bare minimum in the US that’s required under the law, so I’m not sure that this transfers a huge amount of domain expertise to the US workforce.

[tetromino_]

That depends on whether a significant fraction of those workers really are skilled (doing old-school manual machining, manual welding etc.) or they are just semi-skilled and thus interchangeable CNC operators and robot maintenance technicians.