Answering the Aqli Foods contamination: dissolving the holding company and merging six group firms (2013)

Beyond firefighting lay the rebuilding of control

To read this decision only as firefighting against the abnormal event of deliberate contamination is to miss the point. Even if the arrested contract worker’s act was the crime of one individual, the fact that President Kushiro Toshio did not know of the complaints about an odd smell until four days before the public announcement — and had not even grasped the change in the wage system cited as a distant cause — points to a different problem. In a group that left subsidiaries to their own independence, and where the gap in security cameras remained at five at the Gunma plant against up to 35 on the parent’s side, neither quality control nor information from the floor reaches the parent company’s eyes. Dissolving the pure holding company structure can be seen as a choice to correct that failure to reach, at the structural level.

Even so, binding the structure into one did not bring back the lost trust for several years. Raising the number of monitoring cameras from 136 to more than 700 did not by itself dissolve the labour reality in which contract workers made up 60% of the staff and disparities in treatment remained. What the incident showed was that two kinds of slack, in control and in labour, overlapped on the same floor, and the dissolution of the holding company was a response that reached into only one of them, the organisational structure. How far a group assembled from disparate parts could be gathered into a single corporate culture remained a long task, running on into the later unification of the brands.