Egg grader shut down

Friday, July 15, 2011

by BETTER FARMING STAFF

Ontario Ministry of Labour orders are mounting against a Strathroy egg marketer.

On June 30, responding to an anonymous letter, a ministry inspector shut down L. H. Gray & Son Limited’s Strathroy grading facility after finding fault with guards on a pre-loader that transfers eggs onto the grading machine.

It was the fifteenth order that a provincial ministry inspector had issued against the country’s second largest egg producer, grader and marketer at its Strathroy and Listowel locations over the past two years.

The ministry has no record of orders being issued against other major graders in the province within the same time period.

Scott Brookshaw, L.H. Gray’s vice president of processing, confirms the company’s Strathroy plant shut down for two hours to repair the guarding. The company was allowed to process all of the eggs on the line before shutting down. The order was lifted once the repair was complete.

He says the work stoppage had a “zero dollar impact” because the plant was already slated to close early that day.
 
Marilyn Taylor, a communications advisor with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency says the shutdown would not have posed a risk to eggs as long as they were properly stored.

“We’ve been running for how many years and it’s (the guarding) never been an issue,” says Brookshaw. With the problem fixed, “we’ve been running ever since, so not sure if there’s much of a story there.”

“It’s obviously a worker who was not happy,” Brookshaw says of the anonymous letter. "You don’t keep 100 per cent of your employees happy 100 per cent of the time.”

Matt Blager, a spokesperson for the ministry, says only one of the other 14 orders against the company stopped work at an L.H. Gray facility. That order applied to blue storage racking in the company’s main production area in Strathroy. Issued in August 2010, it’s a “very limited stop work order on a very small thing,” Blager says. The order “is still in play.”

Brookshaw explains that the 2010 order had to do with a lack of engineering documentation for the racking. The company removed the racking.

Blager doesn’t have details of the other orders but says, “they’re not all necessarily dealing with hazards.” He says no worker injuries are connected with the orders.

Brookshaw says he’s aware that the company has had “the odd little thing” that has come up but the June order was the first on the company’s machinery.

“We have a very good rating with WSIB (Workplace Safety and Insurance Board) so our workers are pretty safe,” he says, noting ministry representatives recently complimented the company on its policies and procedures for its Strathroy and Listowel plants. If people don’t think a working environment is safe, they don’t tend to stay, he adds. “Our turnover on our long term staff is very minimal.” BF