It always seems that large companies wait until just before Christmas to announce plant closures and layoffs. Perhaps it’s more to coincide with the calendar year than any desire to make a really exciting Christmas for employees, but it always seems a cruel move to have employees trudge out, lunchbox in hand, for the last time amid snowflakes, Christmas lights, and waiting children.

The closure of the Dartmouth Moirs plant is just one more on a list that has become longer and longer over the last few decades. The “Pot of Gold” might be at the end of the rainbow, but it seems having the rainbow end in Mexico works better with the bottom line than having it end in Dartmouth. The closure of an almost 200 year old company follows a typical trend: started as a family business by a Moir ancestor in 1815; Pot of Gold, their best known product, is developed in 1928; it’s managed by several generations of Moirs; the company suffers in the 60’s and is taken over by a group of Nova Scotia businessmen who get an influx of funds and try to make a go of it; it’s bought out by Nabisco (American) in 1967; a new factory is built in Dartmouth in 1975; it’s bought out by Hershey Chocolate in 1987, and finally it’s closed with little warning in late 2007 in favor of moving the factory to Mexico.

Mexico is probably one of the better paid countries that Canadian jobs are migrating toward, but in any labor-intensive industry, there is little comparison for the owners who want (or need) to trim costs. Moirs employees talk of $26/hr jobs being taken from up to 600 workers, jobs that are likely to be replaced by the usual hurried training of about 50 employees for call centre work that will pay $10/hr.

In Mexico, the typical factory worker makes the Canadian equivalent of about $1.13/hr in wages. That translates into less than $2500 per year, in comparison to the Moirs workers who were with the plant for some time and were making about $50,000 per year. How can they compete? A box of Pot of Gold in a Canadian plant would have to be made in certainly less than a “man-hour”– more like about 5 “man-minutes” of labor per box. In Mexico, workers could devote more than an hour of labor to an individual box without seriously affecting the selling price (though the reality is that much of the saving will be profit, since shipping to market is likely not greatly higher from Mexico, and they are likely even closer to raw materials such as sugar and cocoa products.)

A few more comparisons while I’m looking at the land of the sombrero… the average teacher in Canada might be making about $50,000/year, while the average in Mexico makes about $13,000. We might feel hit hard by plumbers in Canada, who likely can make as much as teachers (more in Alberta), but in Mexico they would make as little as $5,000 a year. Service industries and health care are even more poorly paid in Mexico, the average nurse making $1600 per year (about what a Canadian one would make in less than two weeks).

So what have we been moving toward for the last several decades of Canadian employment? We seem to be suppliers of raw materials, which we are almost incapable of manufacturing into useful items and have to sell for manufacture in countries with much cheaper workforces. Gone are the days of drawing materials from your local area to support the local economy— that’s a noble concept that you can cling to only as long as your products stay on the shelves at twice the price of imported goods and you move toward bankruptcy. The manufacturing process of today is to gather materials from all over the world, wherever the costs are less, and farm out production, often in smaller modules, to nations where workers are paid as little as possible, before finally shipping the goods back to us for sale (since the workers in the processing nations often cannot afford to buy them).

How long has it been since you picked up an item of clothing, not to mention almost every other department store item, and didn’t find “Made in China” on the label? While it appears that Canadian clothing plants no longer exist, some, like Nova Scotia’s own Stanfield’s underwear in Truro, still forge on in competition with “off shore” production, probably only by occupying a niche market (men’s underware is not listed on the stock exchange).

Look around you— as I sit at my computer desk, I can flip over a lot of things within reach: my 3-hole punch is Made in China, my calculator is Made in China, my phone is Made in China, my computer mouse is Made in China, the desk lamp is Made in China, a slide scanner is Made in Taiwan (probably soon to be merged with China), and my digital camera (Canon, a Japanese company) is made in Malaysia. Since it’s still early morning, and I’m in my pajamas, I notice that they are Made in China.

If I glance into the other room, I can see our brightly lit Christmas tree— not cut in the woods after a family romp through the crisp snow, but– Made in China, of course, bearing lights that are likely Made in China, and ornaments that, except for a few made by our children or my sister, are made in China.

I used to worry as a younger man that some day the billion communist Chinese would decide to invade North America, but I’ve dismissed that notion since I now realize that they would be shooting themselves in the foot to destroy their marketplace.

So we are to be either a resource producing nation, for as long as that lasts, or part of the “knowledge-based economy”. In the cities this translates into finance, banking, and management, supplemented by retail services (selling the Made in China), and health services (keeping we Baby Boomers alive). In the countryside where a closed factory might have provided the employment for much of an area, we switch our vision to older workers learning “computer literacy” in back rooms of libraries and firehalls, big calloused fingers searching for letters in the crazy arrangement of computer keyboards, wondering if exchanging their labor jobs, often in the outdoors, for claustrophobic call centre cubicles will bring true happiness (until the centre runs out of government funding and locks its doors in favor of moving the whole thing to India.)

In honor of this article, I just popped a couple of Pot of Gold cherry-filled—we got two Pot of Gold boxes with the Christmas loot. I notice that there is no mention of “Moirs” on the boxes, not anywhere. It even has the gall to say, “Since 1928 we have been making Pot of Gold with pride…” and is labeled only “manufactured by Hershey Candy Inc., Mississauga, Ontario”– and they say the Moirs closure came “without warning”? Smell the chocolates, people.

They say change is good… but I’m sure it roars on with some Canadians left in the ditches.

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