Twilight in Batawa: they closed Tom Bata's shoe factory this spring, marking the end of a company town that had outlived its time

• Published in: Financial post magazine (2008) p. 60
• Main Author: Olive, David
• Format: Magazine Article
• Language: English
• Published: Toronto Postmedia Network Inc 01.06.2000
• Subjects: Art galleries & museums; Cities & towns; Company towns; Factories; Plant closures; Towns; Workers; Ontario Canada; Canada
• ISSN: 1919-2010

The triumph of Tomas J. Bata Jr. has long appealed to Canadians' sense of their country's receptiveness to emigres wishing to make a fresh start. The Nazis forced him to flee from Zlin, the original Bata company town in central Czechoslovakia, and from a new base in Canada, Bata then defied the odds against success in rehabilitating a shoemaking dynasty that lay in ruins. At least that's how the story went in the popular imagination. To be sure, the accomplishments of Bata in creating a miniature Zlin in southern Ontario at age 25, building an enormous factory and filling it with 1,000 shoemaking machines spirited out of his homeland as the German army closed in, were considerable indeed. But the worldwide legacy of his father was largely intact in 1939 when Tom Bata Jr. first came to Canada. As the Second World War began, Bata factories and shoe stores were still operating in Britain, Asia, South America, Africa and the U.S. There was even a Bata sales representative already stationed in Toronto. With some difficulty, the farflung outposts of the Bata empire found ways to continue functioning after being cut off from Zlin. During the war, and for many years after, the enterprise was a loose confederation of semi-autonomous fiefdoms run by missionaries dispatched from Zlin, most of them graduates of the founder's Bata School for Young Men. Alas, by the 1990s, even low-cost Batawa, where unionized factory hands earn $10 to $12 an hour, was no longer competitive with the shoe factories of the developing world. Bata Ltd. estimated it had lost $32 million at Batawa during the 1990s in its losing battle with cheap imports. "The Chinese run many huge factories with 5,000 people at a single site," explained a Bata executive one day last November as he led a tour of the Batawa factory on the last day of work for the leather-shoe line. But doesn't Bata do the same thing? The company employs 53,000 people in 69 countries, almost half of whom work in India, Zimbabwe and Pakistan. "Well, yes," said the Bataman. "But we only have one factory of that size, in India." [Roy Radway] remembered a happier time when there was a Bata baseball team and employees signed up with the Bata Braves hockey club. He remembered being nervous on his first day at the plant, working the midnight shift and telling his mother during her lunch break the next day that he didn't think he was cut out for this work. "She told me to give it a chance," Radway said, "so I just kept giving it one more night." Thirty years later, after working at nearly every job in the Batawa plant, Radway was saddened but still grateful for the job that Bata gave him. "We tend today to look at the bad times," he said, "but there have been many good times. When times were tough, there was always a job for you here. This has been a good building."