- Contributed
Thomas Desulme, a Minister of Government in Haiti in 1959.
Myrtha Desulme, Contributor
IN 1959, my father, Thomas Desulme, who was a Minister of Government in Haiti, went to Venezuela and then to France on a diplomatic mission.
It was two years into the presidency of Francois Duvalier, also known as Papa Doc who was a mild-mannered country doctor and a respected intellectual when he came to power. However, by 1959, slowly but surely he started to reveal some very disturbing signs of what would later turn out to be a psychopathically despotic personality.
Upon his return from Paris, based on some alarming reports coming out of Haiti, my father thought it wiser not to return home right away. He therefore settled in Washington D.C. for a couple of years.
Besides being a politician, my father was also an industrialist, who played a part in the industrialisation of Haiti. One of his greatest assets was his foresight, and in the 1950s he realised that the lack of industrialisation would be the greatest obstacle to the development of the so-called Third World, so he set about industrialising Haiti.
Prior to World War II, natural substances were generally available therefore, synthetics which were being developed were not a necessity. Once the world went to war, natural sources of latex, wool, silk, and other materials were cut off, making the use of synthetics critical. During this period, a material called polymer, which includes items such as nylon, acrylic, neoprene, polyethylene, and many more, began to take the place of natural materials, which were no longer available. Experiments with plastics in the 1940s led to the opportunity to use plastic as a replacement for steel, glass, wood and other materials to improve durability, appearance and insulation, and to reduce weight.
The ability of plastics to be moulded to very complex shapes, gives the designer the opportunity to design for assembly, to reduce overall cost, and to produce a more efficient end product. The polymer industry eventually evolved into one of the fastest growing industries in the world. As the plastics industry began to revolutionise the world, being used in every major market, including construction, packaging, automobiles and boats, electrical and electronics, pipe and fittings, and consumer goods, my father decided that this was the field for him to go into. So in 1954, he built the first plastics factory in Haiti.
BOOMING ECONOMICALLY
While he was in Washington, monitoring the situation in Haiti, he came to Jamaica to visit some Haitian friends, fellow politicians, who were living in exile in Jamaica. He arrived in 1962, shortly after Independence, and found a nation which was booming economically. He toured the island and saw tremendous opportunities for investment in manufacturing. He therefore decided to sell his factory in Haiti, to a friend, and to invest in Jamaica. He opened a small factory in Kingston, called Thermo-Plastics, with a grand total of five people on staff, and so became a pioneer in the petrochemical industry in Jamaica.
The advent of Thermo-Plastics was to revolutionise Jamaican manufacturing.
The Thermo-Plastics group encompasses three affiliates: The parent company, and therefore oldest of the group, manufactures a wide range of plastic houseware items, as diverse as garden hoses, buckets, basins, baby baths, containers, plant pots, agricultural and industrial crates, in various shapes, sizes and colours, and industrial products, such as PVC pipes and fittings.
Before Thermo-Plastics, enamel and metal were used for housewares. Calabash, petrol cans and condensed milk tin cans, were used by many to replace the expensive glass and chinaware, which a lot of people could not afford. Thermo-Plastics replaced those with attractive plastic houseware accessible to all. My father would travel abroad, and return with state-of-the-art plastic houseware products, which he would be so excited about that he would personally market them to distributors.
Thermo-Plastics supported many other industries. It introduced the one-gallon and the five-gallon paint pails, which are much easier to handle than the metal ones. The company also got into injection-moulding, manufacturing crates and containers to support the beverage industry. The paint and soft drinks industries have never looked back.
The building industry greatly benefited from the pipes and fittings, as well as from the production of electrical conduits, conduit fittings, pressure, drain, and sewerage pipes, and CPVC (for hot water application). All parts of the PVC pipe and fitting range are manufactured to different internationally recognised specifications and standards. The PVC pipe replaced the cement pipes, which had become suspect due to the discovery of asbestos. The large dimension 12" iron pipes were heavy, corrosive and expensive to ship and to transport. They could not be transported uphill, for example. PVC was the way the world was going in the 60s. It was lighter and easier to handle. It saved a tremendous amount on freight.
Importing the raw material was another way the company saved on freight, and therefore on foreign exchange. If D&G, for example, had had to import crates, instead of having Thermo-Plastics manufacture them, they would have had to pay a substantial sum for freight which can get very expensive, especially in huge quantities. Whereas the raw material was basically a compact barrel of small pellets. What's more, the plastics crates were much lighter, more durable, and easier to handle than carton or wooden crates.
In a bold step toward "backward integration" Caribbean Tooling was introduced. Caribbean tooling was born out of Thermo-Plastics' maintenance department for their moulds and dies, which spawned a tool-making operation.
The contribution that this subsidiary has made to Jamaica's technological development is tremendous. Caribbean Tooling has made it possible for many of Thermo-Plastic's moulds and dies to be made locally, whilst at the same time, servicing other industries. Moulds and dies are capital goods, which would have to be imported from industrialised countries. Producing them here permitted Thermo-Plastics, as well as many other Jamaican plants, to save precious foreign exchange. This was, of course a very critical factor, in the 70's, during the difficult exchange control days.
Caribbean Tooling has become the largest tool and die operation in the Caribbean, and this has contributed to the training and employment of many Jamaicans in the technologies field.
The last offspring of the group was a blow-moulding bottle company called Plas-Pak, which fills the demands of local industry with the production of plastic bottles, containers, jars and vials for the pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries. Plas Pak custom moulds for the hair and cosmetics industries, bottling hair oil and body lotion, as well as for Shell, Esso, Texaco, and Seprod.
FIRM COMMITMENT
Together the group of companies employed more than 500 people. My father had a firm commitment to the development of local industry, and he adopted a far-sighted approach to training. In the initial stages, foreign experts were systematically introduced to set the wheels in motion, and to train young Jamaicans.
But, even though he started out by importing the foreign expertise, he had constant training programmes going on at the plant, in order to ensure that young Jamaicans could eventually take over top managerial positions. He had a firm belief that Jamaicans had the wherewithal to take over managerial positions. To this end, on the job training was constantly provided. The instructors were highly skilled and among the best in the world in tool-making and polymer technology. High school graduates received scholarships to CAST (now University of Technology), and recruiters were sent to CAST employment fairs.
Fifteen scholarships made tenable at CAST, and other related institutions, were offered to promising youngsters. These scholarships were in Electrical, Chemical and Mechanical Engineering, and in Electronic Instrumentation. CAST graduates received scholarships to attend Polymer Chemistry schools in Europe and the U.S. These young Jamaicans are now scattered all over Jamaica in various industries.
Before Thermo-Plastics, the only industries in Jamaica were the soft drinks, dairy, cement and livestock industries. But most of these companies were run by expatriates. Usually engineers and supervisors were not Jamaicans. They worked under the expatriates' supervision. Thermo-Plastics was the first company where the supervisors and department managers were Jamaicans. In the other companies, the manufacturing, engineering, marketing, production, and raw material purchasing departments were all run by expatriates.
My father believed that the aspirations of black people as a race, could only be achieved through integrity, discipline, vision and forward planning, hard work, self-esteem, self-confidence, and the control of our economic resources, in order to engage in nation-building. He had a very powerful vision for economic self-reliance. He believed that the only way forward for Black people, was to achieve economic independence and self-sufficiency, and to take control of their economic destiny.
Financiers, bankers, government agencies dealing with IMF funds, all balked at the idea of placing such sophisticated and expensive equipment and machinery in the hands of young Jamaicans. But my father remained firm and eventually got his way.
Before Thermo-Plastics, all of the other companies, besides cement, D&G, and the dairy companies, were screwdriver and assembly companies, which worked under licensing and paid royalties to foreign companies. Thermo-Plastics was the first company to bring First World industrialisation to the Third World. Not in the pattern of the bauxite industry, where the expatriates ran it. It was very important to my father to show that a Jamaican company could have a fully industrialised plant without foreign ownership, or predominated by imported managers.
A PLANT CONCEIVED, BUILT AND DESIGNED IN JAMAICA
It was this dream which made him a true entrepreneur at heart. Even the plant was an original design, built with the Jamaican culture in mind. The company continually tried to blend as much of the of the plastic resins as possible locally, in the hope that eventually, even the raw material could be produced in Jamaica. Visitors to the plant were always convinced that Thermo-Plastics had to be a subsidiary of a multinational corporation.
Thermo-Plastics brought the plastics revolution to Jamaica, and Jamaica became the hub of the Caribbean for plastics. The company exported to every Caribbean island through T. Geddes Grant, which had an office in every Caribbean capital.
AWARDS
In 1980 Thermo-Plastics won the Producers Industrial Products cup, and the certificate for champion performance in this category in the Jamaica Exporters Association's annual export award. In addition it won the top prize in the champion category of the Prime Minister's award in the Jamaican Manufacturers' Association competition in that year. The company has won many others prizes since.
Thermo-Plastics constantly sought new avenues of development, increasing its export capacity on a yearly basis, and entering new and more competitive markets year after year. It was always exploring and developing new and bigger export markets; always diversifying the product range, and developing new techniques to improve product quality. The company was constantly aiming to produce at optimum capacity. My father dreamt that the corporation would eventually be strong enough to power and sustain an all-Jamaican company of worldwide significance.
He invested in tourism, buying a national landmark Great House in Runaway Bay, which he turned into a five-star hotel complete with villas, thereby creating more employment on the north coast.
During the 70's, in the early days of exchange control, my father had the privilege of choosing to declare his foreign exchange as Jamaican or expatriate, which would have made it easier to take it out of Jamaica. But he always insisted that his assets should be designated as Jamaican, because he was in it for the long haul, for nation-building. He believed that national advancement could only come through the creation of a solid industrial foundation, and the higher development of science. Any Haitian who came to Jamaica in search of work, he would try to incorporate into his workforce.
On his deathbed, he was awarded the Order of Jamaica for his contribution to the development of industry and commerce in Jamaica.
