From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

deteriorate. The problems became so acute that McCain closed Daylesford early in
1975, well before the Ballarat plant was completed. The company had to rely entirely
on product imported from New Brunswick until the new factory was ready. (Daylesford
was reopened temporarily a few years later as a pizza plant.)
Jim Evans, an engineer, came from Canada to be project manager, working with
the construction company to get Ballarat built. When the construction company went
bankrupt halfway through the project, Evans took on the role of general contractor.
His toughest problem was dealing with the unions. It was a period of high inflation
and the unions demanded that quoted prices be adjusted in line with inflation. “It was
called ‘rise and fall,’ says Evans, “except Wallace used to say it was always rise, never
fall. If you made a deal with the bricklayers union and the plumbers got a raise, then
the bricklayers had to get the same raise. It meant you could never know how much
a job would cost.
“Once a building was up to two storeys, everyone got an extra twenty-five cents an
hour bonus for working at a higher level even if they never left the first floor. When
the site got dusty, everyone got an extra fifty cents an hour. It wasn’t that the labour
costs were a lot higher than in Canada, but they were less predictable.”
The labourers themselves were unpredictable. Tim Bliss, who went to Australia to
help oversee the construction and opening of the Ballarat plant, recalls that on Friday
nights the mechanical and electrical construction crews went back home to Melbourne
for the weekend, promising to return first thing Monday morning. “Monday would
come and they wouldn’t show up,” recalls Bliss. “We spent all Monday and Tuesday
calling them. The last ones would roll in sometime Wednesday.”
Production at the factory was supposed to start in January 1975 but didn’t until
August. The final cost was twice as much as had been budgeted. And even after the
plant went into production, the labour troubles continued. The McCain workers were
part of a national union, so if there was a problem with an employer in another part
of the country, they sometimes stopped work in solidarity. Cameron recalls arriving
at the plant in the morning to find the workers outside on the street.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“We’re on strike.”
“Why?”
“We don’t know. We were just told to come out.”
John Clements took over management of the Australian operation in 1976, not
long after the start of production at Ballarat. He had spent his whole career in the
food industry and had previously worked for Cerebos Foods, a British company.
Before even seeing the Ballarat factory,
Clements spent three months
at Florenceville learning about
McCain and the frozen food industry.
He returned to Australia to
find nothing but trouble. The labour
problems – the union was staging
intermittent strikes because wages
were below world standards – were
just one of many headaches.
The product was selling poorly,
partly because of its poor quality
and partly because the sales force hadn’t learned McCain’s end-user technique for
selling to the food service industry. The company had huge stocks of french fries
piled up around the country, some of it unsaleable.
“The potato growers were up in arms because their contract price had dropped,”
says Clements. “The second day I was on the job in Ballarat they marched on the factory
in a group, demanding to speak to me about better prices or they would refuse
to contract with us. That was the only time I have seen potato growers angry enough
that they would march in a group.
“As well, we had huge environmental problems because our plant was causing bad
odours over the city of Ballarat, and the Environmental Protection Agency for the state
of Victoria was threatening to close us down if we didn’t remedy the situation. After I
had been in Ballarat about a week, I thought, ‘What have I gotten myself into?’”
As engineer Neil Murdoch recalls it, there was no waste treatment at the time
but, rather, waste handling. It was, he says, a matter of “What the hell do we do with
this crap?”
Caustic peel waste was being dumped into lagoons on twenty hectares of land
McCain had purchased about thirty kilometres from the Ballarat factory. The site
was about six kilometres from the nearest town, though there were a few farmhouses
nearby. “The waste treatment started quite naturally with these lagoons bubbling
merrily and, of course, making quite a stink, which the neighbours didn’t appreciate,”
Murdoch says. When there was more waste than the lagoons could handle, a student
was hired to spread it on the Ballarat property.
This situation threatened the future of the plant and was demoralizing for the employees,
says Clements. “We were probably the most disliked company in Ballarat.”
John Clements, 1976. The Ballarat factory, 1976.
108 From the Ground up
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