Maple Leaf running at 80% capacity

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This article was published 28/06/2019 (2307 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Labour shortages are hampering production at Brandon’s Maple Leaf Foods processing plant.

In an interview with Reuters published Wednesday, Maple Leaf head of recruiting and hiring Susan Yaeger said that the pork processing plant is only at 80 per cent capacity.

According to Yaeger, this is because of labour and hog shortages, with the hog shortages being caused by labour shortages at Maple Leaf’s commercial farms.

Some industry officials and local politicians said that part of the problem is due to the way Canada’s temporary foreign worker program is structured.

“The biggest factor as far as labour shortages go is the government changes a couple years back to the temporary foreign worker program,” United Food and Commercial Workers Local 832 president Jeff Traeger told The Sun. UFCW represents worker at the Maple Leaf plant.

In 2016 and 2017, the federal government changed several rules for the temporary foreign worker program. This included eliminating the controversial “four-in, four-out” rule and maintaining the caps on the proportion of low-wage temporary foreign workers employers could hire.

Traeger said he is in favour of lessening restrictions on the program because in conjunction with the Manitoba Provincial Nominee Program, foreign workers are given a path to citizenship. He said that with current labour shortages, “workers are under some pressure to work a lot of overtime so they can make up as much as they can.”

“Over the short term, that’s a nice thing because you make some extra money, but we have people who work regular overtime at the plant as part of their schedule week in and week out and have been doing so since 2016.”

Keystone Agricultural Producers president Bill Campbell, Brandon-Souris Conservative MP Larry Maguire and Manitoba Pork Council’s human resources and training co-ordinator Janice Goldsborough all expressed a desire to see the amount of time and paperwork it takes for foreign workers to apply for permanent residency reduced in order to better supplement the workforce.

Maguire, the deputy critic for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, said he believes Canada should institute a “trusted employer” program for employers like Maple Leaf, where companies that qualify don’t have to go through a labour market assessment every time they want to hire an immigrant.

A trusted employer program was one of the recommendations the federal Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities made for improving the temporary foreign worker program in September 2016.

Goldsborough said smaller pork producers and processors are more likely to be affected by the current labour shortages because losing one or two employees is a big blow. “That can severely impact their operating when they may only have three or four people that work in a barn to begin with.”

The office of federal Employment, Workforce and Labour Minister Patty Hajdu said in a statement: “In order to address growing labour shortages for the specialized skills needed in the agri-food sector, Budget 2019 announced the creation of a new immigration pilot to bring in full-time, non-seasonal agricultural workers. This program will include a pathway to permanent residency, to make sure that those who are contributing to our economy have an opportunity to build a life here.”

On an infographic published by the Canadian Meat Council in 2018, Manitoba is listed as the only province the council believes has an successful nominee program for foreign workers.

Traeger pointed to Assiniboine Community College’s new Food Processing Centre for Animal Proteins as a potential method through which processors like Maple Leaf can hire skilled workers. Both UFCW and Maple Leaf have provided funding for the program.

Brandon was recently selected as one of the locations for a federal pilot program aimed at attracting skilled workers to northern and rural communities.

“We’re happy Brandon was chosen to be one of these pilot projects and it helps to match up employers that have a shortage of skilled labour with people from foreign countries who have those skills,” Mayor Rick Chrest said.

Maple Leaf is Brandon’s single-largest private employer, with approximately 1,900 employees. Traeger told The Sun that at its peak, the Maple Leaf plant in Brandon was processing approximately 18,000 hogs a day and employed 2,250 hourly employees. He said the number of processed hogs is closer to 14,000 to 16,000 a day at present.

The national unemployment rate is currently 5.4 per cent, according to Statistics Canada. This is the lowest unemployment rate in records going back to 1976. While this means a greater percentage of Canadians are unemployed, it also means companies like Maple Leaf have a smaller pool of available skilled workers to fill vacancies. The current unemployment rate in Manitoba is five per cent.

A spokesperson for the provincial government said Maple Leaf represents the largest number of employer-supported nominees for the Manitoba Provincial Nominee Program in Brandon. Provided statistics show Maple Leaf offered 10 jobs to MPNP nominees in 2015, 55 in 2016, 59 in 2017, 70 in 2018 and 37 so far in 2019. The province said the total number of MPNP nominations in Brandon increased 76 per cent over 2017, representing 294 nominees working for 144 businesses in the area.

Chrest said he was unsure of how long labour shortages had been a problem at Maple Leaf.

“From my understanding, I don’t think a whole lot has changed. They haven’t run at full-out capacity for quite some time.”

The Sun reported in 2015 that Maple Leaf had reduced the potential peak capacity of their workforce from 2,300 to 1,900 because of hog shortages of 20,000 per month.

When asked for comment, Maple Leaf said the earliest they could speak would be next week, citing the upcoming holiday Monday.

» cslark@brandonsun.com

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