The largest aluminum smelter in the Americas, located in Sept-Îles on the North Shore, will celebrate its 30th anniversary on Tuesday.
Thirty years ago, on May 31, 1992, the first aluminum casting was carried out at the Alouette aluminum smelter in Sept-Îles. The announcement of the construction of this $1.4 billion plant revived the economy of Sept-Îles overnight. Then an executive at the mining company Iron One Company, which had closed its pellet plant a few years earlier, Gilles Blouin plunged into the unknown by becoming the very first employee of the aluminum smelter.
“I had already managed the decline. It might be interesting to try to manage the growth,” he said.
When he was hired as vice-president of the human resources department, he was literally starting from scratch.
“There were offices that had been rented in Montreal, but no paper, no pencil,” explained Gilles Blouin. The latter first set up a small team in order to develop the values of the company, “a structure where people are able to meet, talk to each other, solve problems.”
Then, he examined the best and worst practices in the industry to learn from them or avoid the pitfalls.
A wave of exceptional hiring followed, a memory that reminds Gilles Blouin how much the world of work has changed over the past 30 years.
“Today, everyone is looking for people. When we started at Alouette, there were 569 jobs open. We had 14,000 applications for 500 jobs! It came from everywhere. A lot of Lac-Saint-Jean, the south coast, the Lower North Shore. Very, very good employees,” recalled Mr. Blouin.
The birth of Alouette allowed many young people to return to Sept-Îles, those who had left their town without imagining their future there.
“One of the objectives we had set ourselves was to bring this youth back to Sept-Îles. And it paid off. Look Claude, that’s one of the gang. A little guy from Sept-Îles, like it can’t be,” he added.
Gilles Blouin speaks here of the current president of the aluminum smelter, Claude Gosselin, who began his career as an intern in 1991. He is part of a generation of workers who have risen through the ranks within the company.
“For me, it was one of the big successes of Alouette. To bring people back to Sept-Îles who wanted to live in Sept-Îles,” said Mr. Blouin.
During his 16 years as Vice-President of Human Resources at Alouette, Gilles Blouin experienced several unionization attempts that never came to fruition. “We fought against social cancer for several years. The union has tried several times,” he explained.
Gilles Blouin is also one of the players in the second phase project which enabled the aluminum smelter to become the largest in the Americas with an annual production of 620,000 tonnes. He makes a point of recalling how important the contribution of the Alouette aluminum smelter in Sept-Îles has been to the community for 30 years.
In retirement, he kept a view of the aluminum smelter that he helped create. He is still interested in the affairs of Alouette, a company that still fills him with pride.
“I think they are still in the game. It’s pleasant. You sow something, it grows like a tree,” he concluded.
