Maple Leaf Foods’ bid to consolidate all its primary pork processing at its Brandon, Man. plant took another step forward Tuesday as the company confirmed its plans to double-shift its value-added cut operations there.
That expansion, to be supported by about $50 million in investments, is to start in June and be completed by September. The company will also ramp up its production at the plant from 75,000 to 86,000 hogs per week by the end of 2009, the company announced Tuesday.
The company also said it will consolidate all its western Canadian ham boning operations into its Lagimodiere Road plant in Winnipeg’s St. Boniface district. The facility is to be dedicated specifically to ham boning, which will involve a $25 million expansion, the company said.
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The second shift at Brandon will also involve a $15.5 million upgrade to that city’s wastewater treatment plant, for which the federal and provincial governments recently kicked in $7.8 million. Maple Leaf and the City of Brandon will fund the balance. The province recently also pledged $1.1 million in training assistance for jobs at both the Brandon and St. Boniface plants.
“By the end of 2009, Maple Leaf will create over 1,100 new jobs at these
facilities, supported by an investment of over $120 million,” the company said in a release.
However, the move also involves closing the company’s Warman Road fresh pork plant, which now processes carcasses from the Brandon plant into value-added pork products. That closure, also in St. Boniface, is expected to cost about 650 jobs by the end of September, although the company expects to transfer some of those workers to Lagimodiere — or out to Brandon, about 250 km west.
Most of these moves are in line with Maple Leaf’s reorganization of its meat business in 2006, except that the company at that time had described Warman Road as “a highly modern and efficient plant, and our goal is to ultimately transition this plant to another type of value-added manufacturing operation.”
“We sincerely regret the impact on our employees at Warman Road, and will proactively support them to secure new employment at other Maple Leaf plants or in the local economy,” said Maple Leaf Consumer Foods president Rick Young in the company’s news release Tuesday.
“Company officials stated they tried to find other ‘value added’ work that could go into the facility but they could not come up with a solution to save the plant,” said the Warman Road workers’ union, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 832, in a release Tuesday.
According to UFCW, Maple Leaf had said that “if the right buyer should present themselves they would sell the facility, but (Maple Leaf) stated they wouldn’t sell it to their competitors.”
Robert Ziegler, the UFCW local’s president, said the union had been ready to negotiate a new agreement between the company and the workers, but now must instead focus on negotiating their severance package.
