I think it was in TS Eliot’s “Murder in the Cathedral” that Thomas Becket said to King Henry, be wary of chopping too many trees down. You remove the places where your enemies can hide, but leave you defenceless if they attack you.

I am reminded of this after receiving an email from a former worker at Tomago Aluminium, in Newcastle Australia. He complained that management had seen fit to trim 100 workers from the operations, in the belief that new young technical people could do just as good a job as the older hands. The consequence has been rising iron levels, unstable pots, anodes not performing well, and a myriad of other problems, all leading to an unstable situation.

I am not picking on Tomago here, though it may seem like it. My point is that it is a common cycle in the industry. How many times have we seen this before? Metal prices are low, so management trims costs in one of the few areas they can - head count. It’s true that operations management has little influence on the cost of electricity or alumina. Experienced hands, especially technical people, get a good salary, so they are always top of the list when it comes to cutting costs. And let’s face it, this is what managers have to do, simply to justify their own presence. If they can’t show decent cost cuts, then the next manager above will cut them.

And it’s easy to justify the cut. The pot line is stable, things are running well. We have head office, or the technical centre to fall back on if something goes wrong, but what can go wrong? It’s a steady state process - alumina and electricity in, liquid metal out. If everyone does their job properly, we will be fine.

Famous last words.

Aluminium smelting can be done in a very controlled, steady state process in a laboratory, for a little while. But out there in the real world, life is not a test tube in a laboratory. Workers can fall behind with their pot tending duties. A batch of anodes could have a slight variation in properties. A mechanical problem in the cast house could cause liquid metal transfers to bank up. I can name numerous possible snafus, and I am not even a technical person.

Ask a technical person, and they will tell you, it’s a black art. Getting the balance right is hard - balancing thermal, electrical, mechanical and chemical reactions all at the same time is not easy, especially at the amperages and size of pots and smelters that we see today. But keeping that balance right is much more stealthy. And it is vulnerable to the attacks of HR specialists and those who keep playing with the structure and size of the technical team.

When metal prices are low, as they have been for the last two years or more, aluminium companies do everything they can to reduce costs. But these actions seldom have any consideration for the longer term. Tomago isn’t the only plant having operational problems, and it isn’t the only plant to have cut the very people who could have saved it. It’s too easy to sit in board rooms and make decisions without the real on-the-ground knowledge of the consequences.

One wonders whether the recent problems at Ma’aden can be sheeted home ultimately to a board room somewhere.

The irony is, those same technical experts who weren’t listened to when they were employees, can now charge thousands per hour to be listened to as consultants. Although some of them tell me, even then the plant management doesn’t listen to them.

Postscript - thanks to former colleague Peter H, the bearded one, who as Technical Manager had the same complaints 10 years ago, though back then I didn’t listen to him. Those who know him know who I am talking about.