Company’s employees receive welcome holiday bonus

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This article was published 29/12/2020 (2055 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

With 75 production and distribution locations across the country (and one in Iowa) WGI Westman Group’s concern for the year was to keep its staff employed and COVID-free.

When year-end results indicated there would be a small profit as opposed to an expected loss, owners Russ Edwards and the Edwards family decided to show their appreciation to their stalwart employees.

Just before Christmas, every one of the company’s 1,650 employees received a bonus cheque for $1,500.

“It was a nice surprise for everyone,” said Roger Moran, a shipping department worker at WGI Westman’s steel buildings division, Behlen Industries in Brandon and president of United Steelworkers local 7913. “Everyone appreciated it.”

Workers at Behlen and other WGI Westman companies do not normally receive Christmas bonuses, even in the best years, and CEO Paul Cunningham said the plan was to give the same amount to every single employee.

“It doesn’t matter if you’ve been here for three months or 30 years you got the same amount,” he said. “That was the most important thing for Russ Edwards… that everyone got treated equally and everyone got the same. Everyone faced the same struggles this year. He felt that everyone should get the same amount.”

In addition to the bonus, the company made a commitment many months ago to keep everyone employed.

“Everyone who wanted to come to work would have a job. That was our goal,” said Cunningham. “Whatever we had left at the end of the year would be secondary.”

In a letter to employees before Christmas, the Edwards family said, “All of our divisions were negatively impacted by both COVID and ongoing poor market conditions. We are, however, pleased to announce that as a result of everyone’s significant efforts during this most unusual time and as a result of the resiliency of our long-term efforts to diversify the steel product offerings of the group, we have managed to generate a profit in 2020.”

The company allocated $2.5 million for the one-time payment to every one of its employees.

Moran said he believes just about everyone received their bonus before Christmas.

Not only did some of its operating companies have to deal with softening demand in some sectors and a general disruption of the economy, as one of the largest steel consumers in Western Canada it also had to deal with the scarcity of the supply of steel.

Just before Christmas, the Free Press reported on layoffs at AGI Westeel, a Winnipeg steel bin manufacturer, that was at least partially a result of difficulty accessing steel supply which in turn was partially because of a production disruption at the Dofasco mill in Hamilton.

Cunningham said some of his units are scouring the world for steel supply but that timely orders kept much of the supply flowing.

In addition to Behlen — makers of the largest steel buildings in the world — WGI Westman also owns bin-maker Meridian and is one of the region’s largest suppliers of corrugated steel culverts.

Cunningham said the company has also had good fortune in that other than some isolated cases, most of it plants have been largely COVID-free.

The one exception is a Meridian Manufacturing unit in Storm Lake, Iowa.

“Our U.S. operation was hit hard by COVID,” he said. “We were down quite a few people for quite a period of time. We had some cases at our larger facilities but they never got to the point where we had to have a whole plant shut down.”

WGI Westman had made a few acquisitions in the last couple of years but as a privately owned company it does not always make that information public.

Neither does it make public some of the significant philanthropic donations Edwards has made over the years — he was a major donor to the Meridian Exhibition Centre currently under construction in Winkler.

“It has been a down year, there’s no two ways about it. Definitely not a year to repeat,” Cunningham said.

The goal was to keep everyone on its payroll employed. People who could, worked from home. The company did not lay anyone off and maybe a handful chose not to come to work for health reasons.

“For the most part everyone pulled together,” Cunningham said. “They all sort of felt that we were all in this together.”

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca