By HENRY AUBIN - With the dust settling on the closure of the local Shell Canada refinery, what can we learn from this sad story?
Last fall's shutdown has meant the loss of 500 unusually well-paying jobs, plus the disappearance of many other jobs among suppliers and subcontractors. Shell will convert the Montreal East site into a fuel terminal -"a parking lot for gasoline," in the dismissive words of Liberal MP Denis Coderre.
You can argue that oil refining is the Old Economy and that Montreal needs to focus on knowledge-based industries. Yet a city that ranks dead last in per-capita GDP among major North American metropolitan areas can't afford to kiss off profitable manufacturers like Shell (or Electrolux, whose 1,300 workers will lose their jobs in off-island L'Assomption when operations move to Memphis this year). Nor can debt-ridden Quebec afford to lose the tax revenues such a company and its employees contribute.
How can we avoid this?
One of reasons Royal Dutch Shell gives for mothballing the last of the city's refineries is that it now has a global strategy of focusing on crude oil rather than refined oil. But another reason is that the Montreal facility was one of the least competitive of Shell's installations to help do the refining that the company still needs to do.
When the company declined to explain why the Montreal plant was uncompetitive, the Journal de Montreal approached various managers, inviting them to express their opinion in exchange for anonymity.
The loonie's past weakness vis a vis the U.S. buck has often allowed the Quebec workforce to get away with a productivity that is below average among the provinces. But a strong dollar banishes this comfort zone. "We'll have to become more productive (in Quebec), and that will take a change in mentality," says one manager.
One big obstacle at Shell was the union. The managers are unanimous in describing labour relations over the last decade as rotten.
High wages were not so much the problem, they say, as the energy spent in dealing with grievances and other conflicts, including work slowdowns. To be sure, some managers interviewed refused to demonize the union, saying the top brass could also be difficult. Yet management said productivity at the plant was in the bottom quarter of all of Shell's operations -a criticism the union would contest, saying the figures were manipulated. More than 2,400 grievances were pending at the time of the closure.
Shell's problems illustrate Quebec-wide trends. In December, a Fraser Institute study of the investment climate ranked Quebec last among the 10 provinces for the burden represented by labour regulations.
That same study looked at five other factors in each province's investment climate. The best that Quebec fared was the corporate income tax, where it ranked fourth. In fiscal prudence as well as transportation infrastructure it rated fifth. It was sixth on personal income tax, eighth on red tape.
But let's get back to Quebecers' subpar productivity -that is, the value of an average worker's hourly output. It's as good a measure as there is of a work ethic and, more especially, a symptom of our culture of entitlement. North American society as a whole is often said to have such a culture, but it's especially intense here.
You can see it in the way students practically act as though they were demonstrating in Cairo's Tahrir Square every time the provincial government dares consider raising university tuitions within hailing distance of the Canadian average.
You can see it in the way we expect the rest of Canada to pay, via transfer payments, for social programs that other provinces do without. And you can see it, too, in the absenteeism rate in the Quebec. The Quebec Treasury Board's figures show that the provincial government's workers were absent an average of 12.7 days in 2008. Indeed, 49 per cent of these taxpayer-paid employees were absent between three and 30 days for medical reasons. Either we're very sickly -or feeling remarkably entitled.
Public servants might get away with this mentality - the government has no competition. But globalization and technology won't allow it for the rest of us. Just ask Shell's 500 former workers.
haubin@montrealgazette.com