Cooling pond and Entrance screen at the Linamar Corporation
Introduction
As part of Doors Open 2010, Guelph channelled its inner Stuttgart with tours at the Linamar Corporation.
The Linamar Corp makes precision machine parts for various manufacturing sectors, including the automotive industry. Judging by the tour it appears to be a successful, high-growth multinational corporation, with operations in Canada, US, Mexico, Europe and Asia.
It all started in Guelph, when a young Hungarian immigrant named Frank Hasenfratz set up a one-man machine shop in the basement of his home in 1964. Lucky for Guelph, he found the city to be a supportive environment for what later became an industrial empire. This appears to be a classic tale of a highly-skilled immigrant with ambition and marketable skills doing very well indeed in the New World.
At the entrance to Linamar there is a decorative screen with air-foil shaped blades. These expensive building components create the impression that something highly technical, perhaps aesthetically-inspired is going on inside. Linamar clearly wanted to build an architectural show-piece that impresses the local community. I would say they have succeeded in that goal.
But the architectural aspect of this place is not what is most interesting. Behind the impressive lobby is a large factory floor in spotless condition. It is a high-end machine shop in the European tradition. There are banks of Toyoda CNC machines. There are boxes full of metal filings and gleaming parts machined from blocks of high grade steel. There are signs showing how things should be done. Obviously, process and quality control is of prime concern.
In one room they were testing parts for the McLaren Group, the famous UK race car builders. Not knowing too much about the parts manufacturing business, I would say that working with McLaren is something to brag about.
The whole place has that unmistakable whiff of success. I remarked to my sons, who were reluctantly along on the tour, ‘You know guys training as machinists or CNC designer/programmers might not be such a bad career path.’
Blue-collar knowledge work
At Linamar, relatively small number of people perform highly skilled work. The workers seem to enjoy their work, tending to the CNC milling machines, making and testing metal prototypes. It is clear the instant you walk in the door that this would be desirable employment for many people. There is a sense that people working here have an enviable degree of autonomy.
This is what could be called blue-collar knowledge work.
Canada is not known for blue-collar knowledge work, despite Southern Ontario (and the metropolitan area of Montreal) being the industrial heartlands of the country. We seem much more content with the basic extractive and resource-based industries like mining, forestry, fishing and farming. This has made the country rich, but it means Canada often lacks the skills to produce innovative new products and also makes it vulnerable to the vagaries of basic commodity pricing. The has been true since the foundation of the country.
Southern Ontario has a substantial auto sector, but most of the main action in this industry such as design and development is done elsewhere in California, Germany or Korea. For those interested in industrial design, this puts Canada on the periphery.
Counties such as Germany, Japan, the Netherlands and Switzerland have much stronger craft traditions than do Canada. These lend support to blue-collar knowledge economies through extensive apprenticeship programs and government support for precision manufacturing.
In Canada, there is not the sense that machine-dependent trades, ones that people typically go to vocational school to learn, are the preferred ways of making a living. Knowledge-based industries such as software or telecommunications get much more attention. High-end machine shops like you find at Linamar get much less attention.
In Canada, the dominant and sometimes naive idea is that the only really desirable jobs are white-collar ones.
Mittelstand in Canada
Linamar appears to have its roots in a type of company that in Germany would be part of the Mittelstand, that is, small to medium-sized, family-owned businesses.
In Germany in the 1960′s the explosive post-war period of economic growth called the Wirtschaftswunder was largely a triumph of the Mittelstand.
In German-speaking countries, Mittelstand-type firms have become experts at producing well-designed, highly technical products. Such small, but sometimes extraordinary capable companies have created much of the industrial wealth that provides such high living standards in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Linamar has obviously grown way past the boundaries of the Mittelstand and has become a North American style multinational, but its Mittelstand roots seem clear.
In Canada, an anonymous corporate model is more common, where the allegiances to a skilled workforce or to craft ideals are much less focused. With large corporations the quality of the end product depends more on trans-national economic factors and tends to have little relation to family pride.
Conclusion
At Linamar, it is obvious that Frank Hasenfratz and his family are the original motivating force behind this corporation — or at least, this is how it is presented.
It appears that Frank Hasenfratz brought his machine shop ethos with him when he immigrated to Canada. Without him and his family, there would likely be nothing similar to Linamar on the outskirts of Guelph.
You find this pattern often in Canada. Here we tend to import our expertise rather than develop it in-house. It is unclear whether this is a sustainable industrial development strategy.
For an industrial culture to produce machined objects of high quality, as at Linamar, you have to hold the work of machinists in high regard. In this sense Linamar is both a product-focused workplace, where beautiful gleaming parts are staked neatly in boxes, as well as a worker-focused one where each worker is encouraged to take great pride in their work.
For these reasons a visit to Linamar is refreshing. Unfortunately, it seems like a bit of an anomaly in the current Canadian industrial context.
