Although spring has finally sprung in Thompson, albeit in fits and starts rather than a steady progression of warmer and longer days, there are still dark clouds on the horizon now that Vale has begun issuing layoff notices for the biggest round of job losses that will result from the company permanently shutting down its smelter and refinery around the end of July.
And while much of how those job losses will play out is still up in the air, given that some employees have been offered buyouts, there is at least a little bit of good news in the fact that the company now expects to have about 850 employees at the end of this year and into 2019, approximately 200 more than worst-case scenarios had the workforce pegged at once the unprecedented change in Thompson operations from fully integrated to mining and milling only occurs. Some of those jobs will not be around for a long time, most likely, but at least they are around for now.
In many ways, a lot of the long- and short-term uncertainty that have been the bane of Thompson’s existence ever since Vale originally announced in 2010 that it was planning to shut down the smelter and refinery in 2015, a date that then got pushed back by three years a few years later, is starting to come to an end, and that should be seen as at least a partially good thing. In less than a week, once municipal and school board election candidates can officially declare their intentions to run in the October elections, we’ll have a better idea of who intends to stick around to try to help Thompson negotiate the difficult times ahead and to judge which of them seem like the most likely to be successful.
As many people who have endured personal tragedy can attest, one positive about having the worst thing you can imagine happen to you is that, once you get over the shock to your system and the disruptions caused by whatever that thing may be, you find out that you can survive and adapt to almost anything because the alternative is to give up, perhaps to die.
There is no doubt that the Thompson of tomorrow is going to be extremely different than the Thompson of old, or even the Thompson of today. On the other hand, there are more than 800 mining jobs continuing to serve as the foundation of the local economy for at least the next couple of years and a large market made up of people in the surrounding communities and region who need somewhere to go do their shopping and those two things will combine to ensure that Thompson will still be here beyond 2019. In fact, if you listen to people who live in Thompson as well as those who come to visit for shopping or business or pleasure, what the local economy suffers from the most is a lack of options and, because of that, people resort to going out of town for leisure, or ordering clothes and other items online because they can’t get them here. For a business-minded person, those gaps represent potential markets and if the economy of Thompson is to survive and thrive ion the future, it won’t be because of big employers like Vale employing thousands of people. Just as the wider global economy has done, Thompson is shifting from an economy based on big employers offering long-term jobs with pensions when retirement finally arrives, to more of a gig economy in which those who can adapt and create a niche for themselves will be biggest drivers of growth. It isn’t going to be easy and it definitely won’t be the same as it has in the past, but where there’s a will, there’s a way. Who will be the ones to step up to lead the transition?
