The Hoover Company - Hoover in Australia

Hoover in Australia

Since 1954, the Hoover factory at Meadowbank has been manufacturing washing machines and other products. A subsidiary of the US company, Hoover, it merged with Chicago Pacific in 1985 and Maytag in 1989.

In 1994, Hoover Australia was to be listed as a public company with a six-monthly operating profit of $8,850,000. This sparked a fight between Email Limited and Southcorp, two of Australia's largest white goods manufacturers for a commercial sale. Both were eager to strengthen their market share and further monopolise the whitegoods industry. By December 1994, Southcorp announced a successful bid to buy Hoover Australia. In March 1996, Southcorp began a big rationalisation, sacking workers in maintenance, stores, administration and supervision at the Hoover factory.

At the same time, Southcorp was announcing a big increase in their share price. In April, 1999, the sale of Southcorp Appliances, including Hoover, Dishlex and Chef, was official with Email now obtaining a conservative 60 per cent share of the Australian white goods market.

Prior to the Southcorp buy out, Hoover Australia operated as a US subsidiary with its own administration, sales and marketing, large maintenance and engineering departments, a service division and a much larger production workforce. At this time, in the early '90s, Hoover was making healthy profits, as a result of investment in new technology and machinery through the late '80s, followed by a big drive towards quality improvement combined with a very flexible workforce.

After the Southcorp takeover, a culture of fear was introduced based on a widespread campaign to strip all the indirect labour from the workforce, and a myth that the factory was inefficient and unproductive. Every month it was reported the factory was losing $1 million or more. Morale at the factory went into a downward spiral. This was followed by decisions to stop production of barrel and upright vacuum cleaners, next was the end of the front loader washing machine. Vacuum cleaners and front loaders were replaced with imported products, the plastic moulding production was contracted out, the factory was being stripped of production, volume and jobs. A cost reduction campaign followed with good quality components being replaced by inferior cheap components and a complete breakdown of any real preventative maintenance program, which gave way to a large number of machine and equipment breakdowns. The reality, rather than the myth, was the Hoover Meadowbank site was being run into the ground by corporate decisions.

By the late 1990s Email had finally closed the Meadowbank factory and integrated its white goods manufacturing into the Simpson plant in South Australia. The vacuum cleaner side of the business was sold to Godfreys. Several years later, Email itself was sold and broken up. The white goods division of Email was then sold to Electrolux. Shortly after taking ownership, Electrolux ceased leasing the Hoover brandname and the manufacturing and supply of Hoover white goods ceased in Australia.