Trends of HR management of the sugar industry between 2000 and 2010 in EU countries

Abstract

The sugar industry in the EU has undergone significant changes over the last decade. The mergers and acquisitions and the reform of the sugar market organization led to concentration and an increase in processing capacity, while the number of sugar factories decreased. The goal of this study is to show the human resource management specificity of beet-processing and sugar production in the period between 2000 and 2010 in Hungary and in other EU countries. The analysis is based on data from the European Sugar Manufacturers Association (CEFS). During the data processing, the following human resource management-related indicators have been calculated: employment in the campaign period, raw material and finished product related labor productivity, and raw material and finished product related labor demand. The main findings of the analysis are the following: Over the investigation period each of the calculated indicators showed improvement. The largest improvement was registered in the case of specific sugar production and in the case of labor demand in sugar production. For these indicators the rate of change in some cases exceeded 100%. In the case of the other indicators the improvement was moderate. Hungarian values compared with the values of the best countries of the EU show a significant difference in the case of each indicator. The difference in the case of sugar beet processing related labor productivity was more than double and in the case of sugar production related labor productivity nearly triple. If we compare Hungarian values to the average of the EU countries, we can find that all of the Hungarian indicators have reached or in some cases slightly exceeded the EU level. Keywords: sugar, sugar beet, human resource management, labour productivity, employment