‘Handful’ of job cuts in Wheat City, Winnipeg

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This article was published 26/11/2015 (3818 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A “handful” of positions in Brandon and Winnipeg will be eliminated as part of Maple Leaf Foods’ plan to cut 400 positions across the country in an attempt to get more efficient.

“After years of change to transform our supply chain, we are now in a position to streamline the organization so that we operate as efficiently as possible,” Maple Leaf spokesman Dave Bauer said yesterday. “Our goal is to reduce the cost of running the business, so we can invest more in growing our business, which will create new jobs in future.”

No unionized employees or hourly jobs are affected by the cuts, which targets 400 salaried positions throughout the company.

The bulk of the Toronto-based company’s layoffs will be concentrated in Ontario.

The majority of the cuts will be completed before the end of the year, with the remainder coming in 2016.

It’s just the latest round of cuts for a company that has spent much of the past seven years slashing its workforce, merging facilities and selling off other divisions in a $1-billion attempt to return to profitability.

Many of those efforts were centred on the opening of a new super-facility in Hamilton that covers 402,000 square feet, where some of the latest layoffs will take place.

“We are making organizational changes in how we operate — some people have been promoted, some have expanded roles and other positions are no longer required,” Bauer said.

Twenty-five per cent of the cuts will come through attrition by not filling vacancies and voluntary retirements, according to Bauer.

“These decisions were difficult to make, but we place a great deal of effort on treating anyone whose role has been eliminated fairly and respectfully, consistent with our values,” he said.

Talk of tangible growth has been almost unheard of at Maple Leaf Foods over the past three years as it sunk into regular quarterly losses and started reassessing priorities.

In October, the company reported profits for only the second time in 11 quarters, with net earnings of $18.7 million on slightly lower overall sales.

But analysts were focused at the time on Maple Leaf Foods delaying its earnings growth targets as a percentage of revenue until 2016, from original plans to reach that goal by this year, which suggested a solid recovery was further away than hoped.

Maple Leaf has been chipping away at its workforce for several years, partly through massive job reductions, which included a net loss of 1,550 positions in 2011, as well as much smaller cuts incorporated into its consolidation moves.

For example, last year the company shuttered an old wiener production facility in Hamilton and merged the operations into the super-facility, cutting about 26 jobs in the process.

In the past two years, shift hours were cut at the Brandon facility. Those cuts, however, were attributed to a lack of available hogs due to provincial environmental legislation.

In 2006, the province banned hog barn construction in 35 rural municipalities in the province. Then in 2011, the government implemented what amounted to a moratorium on new hog barns anywhere in the province under the Save Lake Winnipeg Act. The act resulted in a gradual decline in hog production and shortages at the processing level.

Maple Leaf has the capacity to process 90,000 hogs every five days in Brandon, but is currently running at approximately 70,000 to 75,000 hogs, according to plant manager Morgan Curran-Blaney in September.

A new Pig Production Special Pilot Project Evaluation Protocol, announced by the provincial government earlier this year, could stem that tide and lead to investment in capital infrastructure allowing the number of hogs produced in Manitoba to grow.

Overall, the company has shrunk the number of its national meat plants by nearly half to 13 and consolidated into two distribution centres, where previously it had 19.

It also closed two bakeries in the Toronto area and sold its 90 per cent stake in Canada Bread to Mexican company Group Bimbo last year.

Maple Leaf employs roughly 12,000 people across Canada.

ctweed@brandonsun.com, with files from The Canadian Press

Twitter: @CharlesTweed