December 12, 2011 - New Brunswick processor Nadeau Poultry today announced the layoff of approximately one-quarter of its workforce.
Since 2009 the company has been at the centre of a struggle with Sunnymel, the partnership between Olymel and Groupe Westco that intends to build a new poultry slaughtering plant in the Village of Clair, N.B. According to Nadeau, the partnership is now shipping almost 80 per cent of the province's chicken supply to Quebec to be processed, leaving Nadeau without an adequate supply.
The company said the failure of the New Brunswick government to uphold its portion of the national supply management system in the chicken industry allowed Sunnymel to gain a monopoly over New Brunswick grown chicken.
"We have been warning the New Brunswick government for months that there would be more job loss here in the North unless they stepped in. We held out from doing this as long as we could," Nadeau Poultry's general manager, Yves Landry, said in a release.
"We lost another 22,000 birds per week in August," he added. "We decided at that point that we would cut hours across the board instead of laying people off. That is simply no longer viable. We were trying to limit the impact but unfortunately we no longer have a choice. We have hung on as long as we could, with hopes that the government would step in and start regulating the industry as required by legislation. If we want to stay afloat, we had to let people go."
Landry said the company struggled with its decision, particularly with Christmas coming.
"We decided that it was the most humane thing to do. We didn't want people over-extending at Christmas and then being faced with the bills in January and no job. We have close to 30 couples where both spouses are employed here. Clearly, the impact is crippling for those families," he said.
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