You Had a Job for Life Page 22
White described the different approaches men and women take to difficult and dangerous jobs: “Women have a way of figuring out things to make it easier. A guy will just go ahead and do a job. ‘That’s what you’ve got to do, go do it.’ I’ll think to myself, ‘How the hell can I do that a little bit easier?’ That’s the difference. Sometimes there is no easy way; you just have to do it.” There weren’t instances where you could use your feminine wiles to—She interrupted me, laughing: “I wouldn’t even think of trying it. No way. No, you don’t do that, if you’re smart.”
Based on her time working with both men and women, White observed: “You watch your back with a bunch of women. Women have a tendency to cut each other up. The bigger the group, the bigger the cut. When you work with a bunch of guys, if you do your job right, you don’t have any trouble; you don’t get the backbiting. Men are right up front. If you’re doing something they don’t like, they’re damn well going to tell you. Sometimes it’s a nice way, sometimes it isn’t. But you’re going to know where you stand. Women will go around this side; they’ll go around that side; they’ll go over; they’ll go under; they’ll take forever to get a message across. Sometimes it’s nice; sometimes it isn’t. There’s a lot more competition, I think, when women are working together.”
Sandy Mason was sensitive to the changes men were being forced to make when women joined their crews: “Back in the ’70s and ’80s, they felt that they were making a home for their family, and you were coming in and taking your job away from them because you’ve got the seniority. They get kind of nose out of joint. You have to work harder to prove yourself. When I first started for James River, there were some guys [that] did not want to see a woman out there. I had some guys that once I proved myself, they would ask for me for their crew because I’m a worker. I don’t stop going. But you just have to prove yourself.”
As time passed, the women blended into the crew. “When you work on the same crew, you get to know each person’s way of doing things so you can pick up where they left off,” Sandy Mason explained. “I worked with Larry Breault, Larry Davenport, Steve Colby for a long, long time. We knew when one person needed what they needed. If somebody come in not feeling good one day, you knew you’d have to pick up this load, and they’d help you the next day. It was just like clockwork, a nice oiled machine. We worked really good together.”
Eventually, the pranks began. Crew members put holes in her soda can so it drooled on her when she drank from it, and she was occasionally sprayed accidentally on purpose by someone washing the machine. “When they did that to me, too, I felt I was part of the crew,” she laughed.
In May 1986, JR had again doubled in size when it took over the paper division of Crown Zellerbach, another hostile takeover victim of Sir James Goldsmith. Doubling a large corporation overnight, however, incurred massive debt. Between 1984 and 1988, James River shareholders’ earnings fell from 26 percent to 10.7 percent as soaring costs for pulp also ate into JR’s profits.
Northern New England’s paper industry had by then entered a period of decline. The Fortune 500 corporations began to redirect major investment to newer, larger, faster paper mills, especially in the Southeast. Employment at New England’s older, smaller mills had grown steadily until the late 1960s. After two decades of no growth, mill employment began to decline after 1985. Advances in mechanization and automation replaced many of the labor-intensive jobs formerly performed by bull gangs.
Because of its growing debt, James River did not have the capital necessary to invest in modernizing its many, old, noncompetitive mills. Bill Astle, head of the shipping department, explained: “It struck me that Halsey and Williams [heads of James River] were the masters of the art of the deal. They went in and bought up paper mills at pennies on the dollar valuation, and then their stock just went crazy, and so they’d go buy another one, and they were very successful until they’d done that too many times to double the size of the company again. Finally they got big enough that the growth strategy wasn’t going to work anymore, so then they decided, ‘Now we have to find those [synergies], to bring mills together in groups,’ and all of a sudden, rather than a sales force just for the mill in Groveton, it’s a sales force for James River printing and writing, and it’s out in Oakland, California.
“They didn’t seem to have enormous abilities to run the business. The buying and schmoozing with Wall Street—they understood how to make that work. We went from that fear [of Wemyss] to you didn’t have to worry about anything. There seemed to be this lack of accountability. There wasn’t the sense of urgency around everything. It was the start of the dog-and-pony-show era where every month all the departments would come, and they would show charts and graphs and the folks with the company seemed more impressed with ‘Oh, you’ve got colored graphs, great.’ As opposed to ‘Gee, what happened to production?’ That didn’t seem to be where their concern was. They were more interested in the process than results.”
By 1987 the position of general manager of the Groveton mill became a revolving door. Managers lasted only a year or so before moving on. Greg Cloutier asserted: “There isn’t a single mill that’s successful unless the mill manager has a passion for the facility.” “Who was sitting in the corner office in Groveton? [Managers would] come, and it was just part of building a résumé to move on to someplace,” Bill Astle lamented. “Their concern really wasn’t about Groveton.”
He added that the strong bond between labor and management deteriorated under James River. During the Wemyss regime, managers and supervisors were expected to reside in Groveton. “That got lost when James River came in,” Astle said. “It had reached the point where the only people that were still in Groveton seemed to be the hourly folks that had always lived there. I would say the majority of upper management didn’t live in town anymore. And, consequently, the relationship between the mill and the town was not really relevant to them.”
“Mr. Wemyss’s view of the mill at that time was that it had become [James River’s] turkey farm,” Pete Cardin recalled. “Every big corporation has a turkey farm someplace. That’s where they send all their turkeys. That’s what this had become.”
The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 508 points on October 19, 1987, and thereafter James River would operate in the red. Resident mill manager Bill Sleeper reported early in 1988 that Groveton was “far from meeting the corporate financial objectives of a 25 percent ROA [return on assets].” Sleeper expected fiscal year 1989 to be another year of “very careful cost control,” with the goal of reducing operating and material costs, particularly energy expenditures, which then were $14.8 million a year. A few months later, Sleeper emphasized the need to move away from commodity xerographic paper grades.10
Between 1988 and 1992 the United States paper industry largely converted from acid-based paper to the production of alkaline paper, using precipitated calcium carbonate—crystals grown under controlled conditions that did not possess the abrasive qualities of ground calcium carbonate.11 Early in 1989 JR decided to follow suit in hopes of saving $2 million annually. Local boy Dave Atkinson had been hired in May 1986 following graduation from the University of New Hampshire. In January 1989 he was placed in charge of the alkaline conversion.
To convert to a calcium carbonate slurry, the mill had to install more powerful pumps, and the gauges on the machine that scanned the sheet had to be able to read calcium carbonate instead of clay. The sizing system had to be converted from alum and rosin to acetone ketone dimer, a base. Once the engineering and chemistry changes were completed, paper machine crews had to gain a feel for the new process. Ted Caouette remembered: “It was still a learning process how to refine it, how to adjust the water on the table—the drawers between the wire and the first press, how much stretch you’d want there, how tight you’d want to put it. It seemed to be a more tender sheet; the acid was more forgiving. Just things like that, you had to learn.”
The first trials were conducted on Number 6 paper machine i
n May 1989. For the next year there were frustrating setbacks, including problems with Number 3’s colors and Number 6’s wet end draw, reel building, and ridges. The finishing room encountered problems in slitting and edge register. By May 1990 the conversion had succeeded.12
Paper demand declined dramatically early in 1989, and the mill had to sell some products at below cost. By November, the mill had lost $1.9 million in the first ten months of the year; again management called for greater cost savings. New resident mill manager Jim Bailey arrived early in 1990. He conceded he had been warned that morale in the mill was low.13 That spring JR announced it had suffered a 13.1 percent decline in income in the past year, and investment was down 16 percent.
As the Groveton mill struggled to compete against newer, larger, and faster paper machines in the low-priced commodity market, James River accounting practices made Groveton’s mill appear to be even less profitable. Bill Astle explained: “Who do you want to look good? Who do you want to look bad? Groveton had no pulp mill then, so it was all purchased pulp from other JR mills. James River could price that pulp at whatever they wanted to, and that’s what [Groveton] paid. If you went out on the market, maybe you could buy it cheaper than that and improve your numbers.” Astle suggested Jim Wemyss had probably played similar tricks in the Diamond years, but to the advantage of Groveton’s bottom line: “I’m fairly confident that Groveton always looked the best of that whole [Diamond] group because it was Jimmy’s mill.”
Pete Cardin blamed “corporate burden.” “So much of your profit has to go to corporate headquarters to cover their costs,” he said. “It was huge, $10 [million], $12 million a year, and we couldn’t call it profit. It went right to Richmond as corporate burden. It was an expense right off the top. They were taking money and not putting money back in the mill. Any business person that had a head on their shoulders could see that.”
Ted Caouette added: “They stopped spending capital. Once you stop making your equipment better, and you stay status quo, your quality is not getting any better. If you had a problem, you had to put in some new equipment because people expected better paper. The machine tender and the tour boss and all those, you can’t perform a miracle.”
On August 16, 1990, James River announced a major corporate restructuring plan that included the sale or closing of thirty of its less profitable, or “nonstrategic,” paper mills. Groveton and the former Brown Company mills in Berlin and Gorham were for sale. Rumors swirled that the Groveton mill would be shut down any day. Even in the best of times, most people lived paycheck to paycheck. Morale in the community and in the mill plunged to new depths.
James River executive James Matheson acknowledged that the August 16 announcement “marks the beginning of a challenging new period for all of us. Being for sale but not sold, uncertain of the intentions of a new owner, concerned over the reaction of our customers, and apprehensive about our personal futures, we ask ourselves, ‘what can we do now?’” The answer, he suggested, was clear: “focus on the job at hand, and develop an unprecedented commitment to show just how good we can be.”14 Pete Cardin glumly observed, “It was a dynamic, evolving mill up until James River, and then it was a dying mill.”
The week James River hung a “for sale” sign on the mill, a wildly hopeful rumor swept through the community: Jimmy Wemyss would come riding to the rescue and buy back the mill. Wemyss, nearing age sixty-five, cryptically responded that this notion was “food for thought.” He vowed that Groveton Paper Board would remain in business.15
That fall, officials from Domtar, ITT-Rayoneer, and a mysterious group of unnamed private investors toured the Groveton and Berlin-Gorham mills. The local press provided upbeat reports of each visit and later dolefully noted that none of the potential buyers had followed up on its visit. JR headquarters admitted shutdown was a possibility. Mill manager Jim Bailey insisted the mill would remain open but conceded “the shadow that still remains over the mill is the status of future ownership.”16
Jim Wemyss had no inclination to buy back the mill, but as prospects for Groveton’s survival grew increasingly bleak, he began to search for a buyer to keep the mill running. He contacted his friend Arnie Nemirow, CEO of Wausau Paper Mills Company, a small fine and specialty papers corporation headquartered in Wausau, Wisconsin: “I flew out to Chicago and met Arnie Nemirow and told him he ought to come in there. I said, ‘We never really wanted you in the East Coast, but I can introduce you to all the customers you can have. You make similar grades to what we do.’ He said, ‘I’ll think about it.’”
Wausau executives toured the Groveton mill on January 23, 1991. That day the Coos County Democrat’s page-one headline read: “One Week Layoff at JR Hits 125.” Blaming “seasonal slowdowns, the shifting economy, and full warehouses,” James River announced a weeklong “curtailment” of its two fine-papers machines, along with associated finishing, shipping, and maintenance operations. Additional cutbacks on the fine-papers machines were announced in February and April, when two hundred workers were laid off.17 Wausau thought JR’s asking price was excessive and did not make an offer.
To minimize layoffs, James River cut most workers’ hours to four days a week. Louise Caouette recalled an unsettling encounter with one employee: “We were trying to balance out the hours so that everybody kept working, even if it might be fewer hours. I actually had a father who came to me and said, ‘I don’t care if my son doesn’t get his forty hours; I’m entitled because that’s my machine and my shift, to get forty-four hours.’” Sandy Mason kept getting laid off because she could not count her fifteen years of employment at Campbell’s toward her seniority status in Groveton. Her bosses told her they expected the mill to shut down. She took a job at Weeks Memorial Hospital in Lancaster.
By June 1991, James River had found buyers for twenty-two of the thirty mills it was trying to sell, but the three northern New Hampshire mills remained on the market. JR intensified its cost cutting at Groveton by imposing a wage and hiring freeze on both labor and management. “James River had a whole passel of these real small mills that looked like old Number 1 and Number 2 paper machines,” Bill Astle, supervisor of shipping, remembered. “Groveton’s were state of the art by comparison. There was a guy who was the head of marketing, named Bob Cochrane, who said, ‘If I could have this mill, I could make a lot of money by putting all the premium grades on there.’ Politically, it didn’t happen. And so, Groveton was essentially forced into making this low-end commodity grade of paper.”
Late in the summer, James River and leaders of Local 61 began to negotiate a new contract to replace the three-year agreement set to expire on September 1, 1991. JR demanded a wage freeze and that the union accept “flexibility” in the mill’s maintenance department. Murray Rogers, later president of Local 61, became involved in union politics at this time because, as a younger worker, he saw benefits in the “flex” proposal. “I could see that we were being held up by having strict trades,” he said. “They would contract people in to do the work because they didn’t want to fight with us. I was a pipe fitter, and I wanted to be able to weld. Other people in the other trades wanted the flex because of the fact that you would stand there for hours and wait for somebody.” Rogers understood that flexibility offered younger maintenance workers a better hope of finding high-paying jobs if the mill failed: “If the mill did go down, I’d be a heck of a lot more marketable if I could pipe fit and weld. You’ve always got to think about what’s going to happen on the next step. There were mills being shut down all over the country.”
The cover of Coös Magazine’s November 1991 issue that contained the notorious interview with Jim Wemyss announcing that Groveton Paper Board “was here to stay.” (Courtesy Charlie and Donna Jordan)
In October, James River made its “final offer,” a one-year extension that maintained current wage levels and imposed flexibility. Following its leaders’ recommendations, mill workers voted 274–40 to reject JR’s offer. Local 61 president Web Barnett said there wer
e some “glaring issues that we don’t agree on.”18 The union chose not to strike because it realized JR would probably shut down the mill. “It was a tense time, confrontational,” Murray Rogers recalled. “They weren’t negotiating with us, and we ended up working under an old contract.” Eventually, James River forced the union to make concessions—or else. “Nobody wants to give up anything,” Rogers said. “That’s the way unions work.”
In October 1991, with the local rumor mill working overtime, Wemyss agreed to a rare interview with Donna Jordan, publisher of Coös Magazine. He told her the mill faced its greatest crisis and blamed JR for the mill’s “deterioration.” Jordan asked what was going on with James River. “I don’t know,” he replied. “They don’t talk to me and I don’t talk to them about business.” Wemyss added that Paper Board had received “little or no management” from JR despite the management agreement. Wearing a cap with a logo reading “Groveton Paper Board” and “Love” on it, Wemyss was emphatic about Groveton Paper Board’s future: “No matter what—we’re here to stay.”19
When Jordan’s article hit the newsstand, relations between the two mills broke down completely. “James River fired me because they were trying to get at Mr. Wemyss,” Shirley MacDow said. “What’s it got to do with me? They figured if they fired me, they could make him toe the line. James River wanted him to do things a certain way. And that didn’t work, so they went after me. It was not a nice time. I went over to his [Wemyss’s] house, and I said, ‘I’ve just been fired.’ ‘Huh?’ He called the board of directors, ‘Put Shirley on the payroll.’ And so, it was immediate.”
Pete Cardin said he and his fellow Paper Board workers “didn’t understand the relationship between Groveton Paper Board and JR.” As relations between JR and Wemyss worsened, Cardin recalled, Paper Board workers remained confident they would have a job: “It was very nerve-racking in some ways, but we always had this sense that even though we were part of James River, we’re somehow protected because Mr. Wemyss would always come along. He’s a funny guy; he would always push [James River] a little bit to see if they had any balls, so to speak. Most companies probably would have told him to stay out of the mill, but they didn’t seem to. He’d come in the mill, and he’d rabble-rouse and say, ‘Don’t worry boys, I’m going to take care of you.’ By doing that, he would give us a sense of, ‘We’re OK because Mr. Wemyss is here.’ Towards the end, it was obvious that James River was really, really struggling. Mr. Wemyss was in the mill quite often, and I think he was trying to give the whole mill some sense that there was some hope here.”