If one wanted an abject lesson in miscommunication, one could hardly have been better served than by picking up the Waterbury Republican-American newspaper last week.
On Wednesday, the paper bannered the closing of the Peter Paul candy company in Naugatuck. That afternoon, the sweets-maker’s parent, the Hershey Co., gathered its Connecticut workers and told them that, yes indeed, the newspaper had gotten it right. The 80-year-old plant is closing, and another 200 or so jobs are exiting the Nutmeg State.
On Thursday morning, the Republican-American’s front page carried a different headline. It touted the grief of the workers, who were thunderstruck that they had to read in the newspaper that their jobs had melted away.
Hershey officials did a horrible job in communicating to its employees. Newspapers love scoops, but there’s no joy in surprising readers that they’ve just been canned. The company knew the paper was planning the story, and it should have found a way to tell its own employees what was happening before they read about it in the daily news.
That said, it’s nonetheless difficult to listen to the words of those displaced workers. They are, of course, shocked that the plant is closing. So is the city. So is the state. The question is, why?
Hershey is moving the plant’s production of Mounds and Almond Joy candies to Virginia. The action comes because the candymaker’s plants aren’t working anywhere near capacity, and so it’s making the reasonable business decision to consolidate operations.
The Naugatuck facility was running at about 40 percent capacity, Hershey asserts. If that’s true, surely the workers and managers there were aware of it. If your machinery is only being used 40 percent of the time, that’s got to set off warning flares that there’s a problem.
It’s true that the Virginia plant that Hershey picked is also running severely under capacity. But when Hershey officials looked at where business costs are lower, energy costs are better, and manufacturing help is plentiful, it didn’t think those were marks that Connecticut is hitting.
City and state officials were not unaware that problems were afoot. Indeed, both the town and state had provided economic assistance to the plant before. The Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development recently put together a package that helped the company shave some $80,000 a year off its energy bills.
But Hershey officials recently turned down opportunities to talk about other aid. And in February, the Pennsylvania-based food maker said it planned to slice some 1,500 jobs nationally and significantly streamline its production lines over the next three years.
It’s hard to think of a more clear warning sign than that.
What, we wonder, would workers have done? They already knew that they weren’t working to capacity. We’ve heard no stories of employees banding together to take to management a plan to increase productivity, drive down costs, increase the value of their efforts to the company.
The employees are not to blame for the plant shutting down, although it is a travesty that such an iconic product should leave our state. But neither is Hershey to blame. It had tried through the years to bring up the productivity level at the plant, to get it to be more cost effective. Nothing it did worked. This was a straight-up business decision.
What if the state had put two-and-two together two months ago?. What would it have done to save these jobs? What could it have offered? If the workers were smarter, what could they have done to foresee this situation and to take control into their own hands? Would Hershey have been swayed by such tactics?
Maybe it would have been. The company was in the process of consolidating production, not offshoring it. Perhaps, pulling together, everyone could have done enough to at least pique Hershey’s interest in keeping the Peter Paul production here.
But that is conjecture. None of it happened. None of it got communicated. The only thing that did get said is that these important jobs are going away. That is not just desserts. It’s a bittersweet end that didn’t have to be.