Content area
Full Text
Jarvis Porter last week reacted to market conditions in the drinks market by announcing factory closures and 300 job losses. Declan Salter tells GARETH WARD that such action was needed to put the company on a sound footing.
Declan Salter has been on a walkabout around the Hinckley factory. Nothing so unusual about that, many managing directors will do the same first thing on a Monday morning. Nor does his report show anything untoward. He says: "Everybody is working flat out this morning. There wasn't a hint of disruption, nor was there any disruptive action on Friday."
However, it is no ordinary Monday at the Jarvis Porter works in Leicestershire. For after a week of speculation, the staff on the previous Friday was told that 260 jobs are to go from the operation, around half the total.
"Yes, there were worried faces among the staff," he says, but if anything there seems to have been a determination to get on with the task in hand. "The quality and speed of work is as high as I have ever seen it," Mr Salter continues.
He has not seen that much having joined Jarvis Porter in October as managing director of the international drinks and beverages division. Part of his brief was the strategy for integrating the acquisition of the Wace Corporate packaging "superplant" into Jarvis Porter.
That is the operation at Hinckley where Wace had tried and failed to make a single business out of the Ferry Pickering carton production operation, and the Ripley and Ripley Roll label printing units.
That problem is now being solved in the bluntest way possible. Label production will move to the group's Leeds and Glasgow operations leaving a hole in Hinckley which will be partly filled by moving carton production at Jarvis Porter Brookside, Leicester to Hinckley.
The exact details will be worked out between management and employees over the next 90...