The agreements signed by Alcan respected, according to retired professor Pierre Deschênes

The retired professor of organizational psychology from the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi (UQAC) launched the book on Wednesday at the premises of the institution. The 260-page book is the result of the work of a research team that began in 2011.

Among the 14 testimonies of former executives collected, we find in particular those of David Culver, former president of Alcan, Patrick Rich, ex-president of Aluminum Canada, Jean Minville, who was vice-president environment of Alcan Aluminum, Claude Chamberland, former executive vice-president of Energy and Primary Metal, or Dominique Bouchard, who concluded his career as president of Quebec Iron and titanium at Rio Tinto.

Former public relations managers, such as Jacques R. Gagnon, who was vice-president of public relations for the Alcan Electrolysis and Chemistry Company, or Margot Tapp, former director of communications and public affairs for Quebec, also testify.

A little over a week after the exit of a group made up of around twenty former executives of Rio Tinto and Alcanwho believe that the company is not respecting its investment commitments in the agreements signed between the multinational and Quebec, researcher Pierre Deschênes points out that he heard a different story from the senior executives interviewed.

“In the volume, when people, what they tell us, the leaders of Alcan, is that they did the work they had to do in terms of hydroelectric agreements,” he said. indicated, in an interview at Public placeWednesday, when asked about the public release of former executives, most of whom worked for Alcan.

“To my knowledge, through what people have said, there is respect for the agreements, at the Alcan level, for the agreements they had signed,” he later added, after some hesitation.

An outing with “a lot of emotions”

The exit of the old executives, last week, seems to him to be above all emotional.

“I feel like sometimes there’s a lot of emotion, there’s a lack of facts,” he said.

The researcher estimates that the group of about twenty executives did not include leaders who were in the upper echelons of the company.

” What I would have liked; there are no decision-making frameworks. They are middle managers. So they weren’t at the center of the decision-making mechanisms and I would have liked them to go and see people who were at the center. »

The group of former Alcan executives is represented by Jacques Dubuc, who was director of communication and relations with Primary Metal partners for Europe and Africa when he retired, and by Myriam Potvin, who was a consultant in internal communications and community relations.

The evolution of management practices

The researcher and his team are interested in the evolution of management practices of the multinational from 1967 to 2007, in the work Testimonials from leaders of the multinational Alcan in Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean and abroad.

This period, which Pierre Deschênes describes as “a pivotal point in the development of Alcan”, witnessed a change in culture within the multinational, in order to develop more cooperative relations between managers and employees, he explained. .

“For 40 years, people really did. There was a democratic governance where we have a meeting of the relationship of cooperation; develop models of working relationships, team building, reasoned negotiation, how to reason based on the relationship of trust,” he explained.

The period was particularly marked, in terms of labor relations, by labor disputes in 1976 and 1979 in Arvida.

The leaders have relied over the decades on their close relationship in order to carry out their development projects and achieve “a form of democratic governance”, he said.

“All these people worked together and helped each other. And by helping each other, they could basically develop more autonomy, because they had more self-confidence and they had more confidence in the development they were doing,” noted the researcher.

Pierre Deschênes also noted the pride of the former executives interviewed to work for Alcan, even if within the population, he observes that this pride sometimes translated into a “love-hate” relationship towards the multinational, which was also subject to criticism.

” Alcan was very close and very proud to belong to the region. Among the people I met in the interview, there was that pride. »

Two other volumes planned

A second volume, devoted in particular to training, health and safety and research, is also planned. A third volume must then be devoted to labor relations, indicated Pierre Deschênes.

The research project represented a “gold mine” of information and a “dream” for the researcher. Thirty people were interviewed in total.

The project has 13 partners, including the Quebec Center for Aluminum Research and Development (CQRDA), UQAC, the Quebec Research Fund – Society and Culture, the Saguenay Historical Society, Rio Tinto and Promotion Saguenay.