February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Stephen McKinley
Pink slips and glum faces abounded in Ballina recently, when the 180-strong workforce at Henniges Elastomers, one of the town’s biggest employers, learned that the car parts manufacturing plant was to close down.
But rather than accept their fate, the factory’s management team has hit on a novel plan to save the workforce from unemployment — it has put the entire operation up for sale on the Internet, at www.mayo-industry.com.
Many of the workforce are returned emigrants, and most had several family members who worked there. The company has been making plastic injection-molded car parts for Mercedes, General Motors, BMW, VW and Audi for 12 years, and the young, skilled workforce, according to the web site, acquired a reputation for quality manufacturing and outstanding team work.
But the operation fell victim to that nemesis of the Celtic Tiger, cheaper labor elsewhere. Some overseas companies that have invested in Ireland since the 1980s are now finding cheaper skilled workforces in Poland, Romania and the Czech Republic, and are abruptly moving their operations.
Ballina, in north Mayo, is a town of about 9,000 people in an area with a total population of 24,000, and the workforce at Henniges Elastomers was contributing about $6 million to the town annually in wages, according to Michael O’Donnell, the plant’s general manager who has been the inspiration behind the web site.
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He saw the writing on the wall from 1998, when the workforce topped 400 — an incremental decline has followed since.
"There has been a net loss of 400 jobs in the town over the last four to five years," O’Donnell said. "Coca Cola came in about a year and a half ago and created 175 jobs," but the trend for this particular kind of manufacturing has been downward, with rural counties like Mayo failing to benefit from the high-tech and pharmaceuticals boom in other parts of Ireland.
"I’m down to 70 people," O’Donnell said, "and by the end of June I’ll have about 20 left." Rather than see the workforce dispersed and the collective talent lost, he decided to see if he could sell, or at least sustain, the operation as a complete package.
"I grew up in this area, and a lot of the people affected, I went to school with them," he said. "I’ve got great commitment from my workforce. The way we face this reality is to fight it."
What O’Donnell fears, the splitting up of the talented team, is already happening, however. As soon as news of the closure broke, calls came through inviting some of the workers to transfer to other factories in the Republic.
"It’s difficult to reassemble a team after a few months," O’Donnell admitted, but his workforce has shown strong commitment to staying together in the area.
"It’s impossible to work with the same people for five or 10 years and not recognize the qualities they have," one worker told RTE radio.
The web site gives a comprehensive description of the company, describing what it has been making to date, the shifts and hours worked per week, the high standard of manufacturing and even a detailed floorplan of the factory, which, even though it belongs to the parent company, can be easily re-leased, O’Donnell said.