You Had a Job for Life Page 27
There was one other unwinnable battle: “The price of fuel up here just killed us,” Cardin lamented. “Energy killed us.” In 1999 Wausau had decided to build a co-generation plant for its Groveton plant, forcing Paper Board to construct its own co-gen plant. “I think they could have put the co-gen in and charged Groveton Paper Board a fair fee,” Greg Cloutier said. “And I think the capital costs would have been allocated out.”
From 2001 to 2005, the price of natural gas skyrocketed. “The thing with natural gas is just crazy,” Cardin said. “When we first went on to natural gas, we could generate all our steam and electricity, and our fuel bill for the month at Groveton Paper Board was about $15,000. When we shut that mill down, that bill was about $100,000 a month. When we first put the turbines on line, we were using 5,000 dekatherms of gas per month. When we shut the thing down, we were using 4,200 dekatherms a month. We were making more paper for less gas.”
In 2002, Box USA, headquartered in Northbrook, Illinois, bought Jefferson Smurfit’s 28 percent interest in Groveton Paper Board, and Ray Duffy departed. Pete Cardin reflected: “We missed Mr. Duffy because Roger Stone [head of Box USA] was a numbers guy. Cold capitalism. This is very cold capitalism.” Two years later, Stone sold Box USA to International Paper, the largest papermaking corporation in the world. Why, I asked Cardin, had Stone sold to IP? “Make a buck,” he answered. “This guy knows how to make money. Unbelievable.” Did Stone have any connection to the Groveton community? “Nothing,” Cardin shot back.
Initially, Cardin was hopeful the new owner would revive the small company: “Their professional papermakers made a tour of the mill, and they said, ‘You guys have potential here. We can help you. We can sink some money in this place. We can get more production out of this mill.’ We felt pretty good. ‘Finally somebody’s going to spend money here; we’re going to crank up our production; they might even put a new machine in here. Who knows?’ I’m the kind of person that loves to hear positive news. I want to be optimistic about the future. I was fifty-six years old. I wanted to know that there was a few more years left in this place, and I really wanted to make it to retirement. Plus I really care about the people in Groveton.”
International Paper did not invest in Paper Board. On July 19, 2005, corporate headquarters announced a $10 billion restructuring plan that included selling off or shutting down its higher-cost mills.2 “We’re a New England–based operation,” Cardin said, “so if you’re going to freight paper out of Groveton, you need to freight it to the New England, New York area, Canada. We were shipping paper to, in some cases, Arizona, the Midwest. There’s no money in that. We knew every month as the numbers rolled in, we were losing money; they could not keep us running any longer. That final year the numbers were just getting worse every month.”
Lack of orders shut down Paper Board for a week at the end of July 2005. Following Hurricane Katrina in late August, natural gas prices began to soar. On September 11, Paper Board shut down for two weeks. A few days later, International Paper, which by then owned 40 percent of Groveton Paper Board stock, hung a “For Sale” sign on the Paper Board mill.
Cardin’s production staff had exhausted itself in cost-cutting and efficiency improvements: “Probably starting in the late summer, early fall of 2005, no matter what we did, it was heartbreaking. I think it was in October 2005, I was talking with Paper Board superintendent Tom Pitts, and he said, ‘It’s not looking good. Something’s going to have to give here before the end of the year, otherwise we’d better be prepared for some kind of long-term outage to get through this energy crisis.’ He’s looking at the numbers on a daily basis, and he’s getting the gas bills, and he’s looking at the long-term market costs that are coming in. He keeps asking me, ‘What can we do?’
“I’m trying to think of anything, anything. I’m asking my guys, and we’re all trying very hard. Everybody knows, ‘This is it. We’re on the edge.’ The guys on the floor are asking me the same thing, ‘How are we doing?’ I’m answering, ‘You guys keep doing the best you can. What you guys are doing right now is keeping us going.’ It breaks your heart. These guys at the end of their shift, they see you, and they tell you, ‘We did great tonight; we did great today. We never had a skip. We had a real good run. How do the owners think we’re doing?’ You tell them the best you can, ‘They think you guys are doing a great job.’ What are you going to do? Are you going to tell them it’s hopeless? You can’t do that.”
In mid-November International Paper announced it must complete the sale of Paper Board before year’s end—or else. A month later IP informed Pitts it was shutting down Groveton Paper Board on December 31. “The holiday season is coming on, and Tom has pretty much told me, ‘We’re shutting down.’” Cardin said. “‘On January first, we’re down; that’s it. We’re done.’ Merry Christmas.” IP spokeswoman Amy Sawyer told a local reporter: “Unfortunately, the smaller mills with older, narrower machines tend to have less capacity and higher costs.” In the last half of 2005, United States mills with the capacity to produce a total of eight hundred thousand tons a year of corrugated medium were shuttered.3
Cardin orchestrated what he termed a “clean shutdown,” as if it were merely another temporary layoff and not the death of a mill: “What we gave for a speech was, ‘We’re gonna shut this place down. We’re going to have a real good shutdown, an orderly shutdown because there’s always hope that we’re gonna start this place back up again.’ We never want to give up hope.”
Was there any sabotage during the last days of the mill by embittered workers? “None. None. The morale was good,” Cardin replied. “Everybody thanked us for doing everything we could to keep this place running, and we made it absolutely clear that it wasn’t anything they did or didn’t do that allowed this to fail. Nobody blamed anybody.”
Right before Christmas, the local mill managers met with Paper Board workers to inform them of the mill closing and to outline their severance package. Labor laws require that workers receive sixty days’ warning of a plant closing—with pay. Accordingly, the official closing date for Groveton Paper Board was March 1, 2006. “We told them what the package was, how they were going to be treated and everything,” Cardin said. “[The last day] was melancholy, but it was a time of wishing each other well. It was like life goes on; it was kind of cheerful, in a way.”
Murray Rogers, president of Local 61, praised the efforts by Tom Pitts to protect the workers’ interests during this nightmare: “Tom Pitts—he did the best he could do. Those guys aren’t the guys who are pulling the strings. They do what they can; they take a personal stance for the people.” The eighty hourly and twenty-eight salaried workers received the sixty days’ pay guaranteed by law, and an additional week of pay for each year’s service, up to twenty years. Their medical, life, and dental insurance was guaranteed through March 2006.4
The workers in both mills belonged to Local 61, but Paper Board workers did not have seniority or bumping rights in the Wausau mill. Murray Rogers and the union did all they could to help Paper Board workers find jobs with Wausau. A few maintenance workers with specialized skills were able to move over. Dave Atkinson said Wausau would have gladly hired more, but it had been on a cost-cutting, jobs-reducing campaign for years: “Had we been in a market where we were expanding, I guarantee you we would have hired every one we could—the good ones. We wouldn’t have scooped up the bad ones. Every operation has its bad ones.”
Why didn’t Wausau buy Paper Board? “There was never a thought of buying it,” Atkinson responded. “If they had said, ‘We’ll give it to you,’ I don’t even know that Wausau would have said yes, because it would have been a higher tax burden.”
On January 5, 2006, Atkinson wrote a sharp letter to Tom Pitts outlining Wausau’s grievances with the Paper Board shutdown process: “The agreements between our companies require us to coordinate our activities and to limit to the greatest extent possible, interference with the other’s use of the facilities.” Atkinson requested “bet
ter communications,” pointing out: “Already, your actions in drawing your tanks all at once without coordinating with us has had a negative effect on the wastewater treatment plant.” Wausau Happenings later reported that the flood of discharged black liquor, chemicals, and ash had “caused a toxic shock to the activated sludge process.” Wausau shut down its paper machines for nineteen hours until the wastewater treatment plant’s pH was restored to sanctioned levels.
Without Paper Board, Wausau’s struggles for survival intensified: “It hurts us from a cost standpoint,” Atkinson explained. “We certainly shared and allocated some costs. Mostly on waste treatment at that point. They owned one clarifier; we owned the other, but they operated in concert with each other. There’s a lot of things that need to be maintained. There’s a big blower for the aeration lagoon that uses a lot of energy. So there was a fairly high cost center associated with waste treatment. I don’t think they paid their last couple of bills to us. We said, ‘All right, we’ve got to reconfigure the waste treatment facility, downsize people.’ Only one clarifier instead of two. They always paid a little bit more, and it had to do with the fact that they had a pulp mill—their waste had BOD [biological oxygen demand] in it. We didn’t have to treat our waste the same as theirs. We reconfigured the waste treatment plant, but we didn’t cut the costs in half. They only came down to about 70 percent. That certainly didn’t help.”
The mill literally became a colder place that January. Atkinson explained: “There were vast sections of the mill that were being heated by their waste heat. Their paper machines were not making paper anymore, so there’s not warm air being funneled into [the shipping] warehouse. All of a sudden, our heating costs went up.”
Groveton Paper Board ceased making payments to Wausau on December 31, 2005. On September 20, 2006, Wausau filed a $1.1 million lawsuit against Groveton Paper Board charging breach of contract. The suit alleged that Paper Board already owed Wausau $430,000 for overdue payments and other expenses. Wausau sought an additional $29,000 a month until November 1, 2007, when the three-year operating agreement expired. The suit also covered Paper Board’s share of costs for sludge disposal, utilities, maintenance, taxes, and insurance, as well as cleanup and repair costs incurred by Wausau when Paper Board’s boiler malfunctioned and forced Wausau to shut down some of its work area. IP gave Wausau the runaround.
In 2007 an outside crew of demolition scrappers began to dismantle and remove Paper Board machinery and other assets. Love in the Afternoon ended up being shipped to Vietnam—a bitter irony for many mill workers who had fought in that still-controversial war. The demolition operation caused Atkinson one last Paper Board–related headache: “The people who were in there tearing the metal out, tearing the equipment out, kind of scavenging the place, some of them [were] a little surly, don’t follow safety rules. There were a lot of battles that I had with IP at the time because the phone number I had to call was some lawyer in Memphis. It certainly was a lot of time that I, and others on my staff, needed to spend on something that wasn’t adding one ounce of value. It wasn’t helping our customers; it wasn’t helping our efficiency, but it was a necessary evil.”
PETE CARDIN: “I HAD EVERY OPPORTUNITY”
Of all the former mill workers I interviewed, Pete Cardin, who had been hired in 1968, was the most devastated by the shutdown of the mill. He had returned to the mill in 1971 following a three-year stint in the army: “I didn’t think I was going to go back to the mill. I don’t even know why I came back to the area, but I did. Typical lost soul from that whole mess. The [Vietnam] war was highly unpopular, so nobody talked about it. It was like you disappeared for a while into someplace, and you came back, and people just expected you to get on with your life. Uncle Sam had given me a pretty good check when I left the army, and I partied that away pretty quick. Somebody told me, ‘They’ve got to hold on to your job.’ I said to myself, ‘I’ll give it one year, and I’ll put some money aside. I’m not going to spend the rest of my life here, no way.’ Twenty-one years old. Little did I know. But, like all things, life has a way of going by, and you start tying yourself down, and you get married, and you have obligations. You work because you’ve got to work; it was a good job, paid well, and people were good to work for. Benefits were great.”
Pete thought he had a dream job working on the fine-papers machines from 1971 to 1974. He was progressing steadily toward the highest-paying jobs, back tender and machine tender, when he was ordered off the paper machines by his doctor: “I developed an allergy to the dies and stuff that they used on the machines. When I was told I couldn’t work on the paper machines anymore, I swear to God, my heart was broken. I loved it. Oh, I loved the paper machines. It was the camaraderie. It was that esprit de corps. The teams; we’re all in it together; it’s us against the machine. It was really never that monotonous. You never knew what you were going to get into that night. I really liked the culture of the paper machines. When I was told medically I couldn’t work on them anymore, I was devastated.”
He transferred from the paper machines to the construction crew: “I went to places in that mill that I had never known existed because we’d wander everywhere, all over the roofs, all throughout the mill. That’s when I realized, ‘This place is big, all this stuff, holy mackerel.’”
During his stint on the construction crew, Pete was on the lookout for a more permanent job. Eventually, he was hired to unload chemicals for Paper Board’s neutral sulfite semi-chemical pulp mill and for the bleach plant that bleached the stock for the tissue and fine-papers machines: “[It was] a very enlightening job. Very dangerous stuff. Extremely dangerous stuff. I learned an awful lot about chemistry on that job. Made a lot of money, worked a lot of hours. Probably the most money I ever made in the mill.”
Pete considered his transfer over to Paper Board in 1975 a “life-changing experience.” Why? “The reason I say it changed my life is that it opened up all the doors for me that I passed through later on,” he responded. “If I had stayed where I was, I never would have achieved the level of success that I [enjoyed] in the pulp mill. There were fewer opportunities on the paper machine side than there was in the pulp mill. The pulp mill was in a state of transition. They were building the chemical recovery system at that time. A lot of the older operators didn’t want anything to do with the new chemical recovery system because it was horrendously complex, a real beast. I was twenty-four. The next youngest person was probably thirty-eight, thirty-nine years old. And all the other operators were in their late forties, early fifties; some guys were in their sixties. There wasn’t that much young blood in the department.
“For a young guy, this was great; I had every opportunity in the world, and I loved the challenge. I found it more interesting than working on the paper machine, much more of a mental challenge. I got a lot of sense of satisfaction of learning the process.”
After working for several years in the pulp mill, he was made a fill-in shift supervisor, or tour boss, a part-time salaried job. The rest of the time, Pete continued to work at a union job. He was promoted to full-time shift supervisor of the chemical recovery system and the pulp mill in the mid-1980s. In 1990 he became superintendent of the pulp mill, and in 1996, after a shake-up in management, Pete became production manager for the entire Groveton Paper Board operation, a position he held until Paper Board shut down.
“[After the shake-up] I was faced with a big challenge. People were being demoted or transferred, and I had been promoted. So there was the politics of all of that. Tough times personnel-wise. Tough times for people’s feelings. But everybody knew that the more important thing was the survival of the mill, and are we the right people in the right place in the right time? You don’t just prove that by saying, ‘I’m the boss.’ You have to prove that by bringing together a team of people that had trust and respect for what you say. When things happen, and they’re not going well, and you’re up to your neck in alligators, and everybody is flipping out, somebody has got to make a dec
ision. You’ve got to take a risk. You have to make the most educated guess you can and go for it. If it didn’t turn out right, I would always take the responsibility that it was my decision. ‘You guys gave me advice. I didn’t have to listen to it. I listened to it; I made that decision; then we get on with it. If it fails, then it’s my decision, not yours.’
“So, by behaving that way, plus I had a good rapport with the guys on the floor because I came from there. They respected my ability as an operator. They would always appreciate my help because I had spent a lot of time with them teaching the things that I’d learned. Especially the new guys; I’d work with them and make their job easier because they’d get themselves into problems, and they wouldn’t know how to get out of the problem. Instead of screaming at them and give them hell, I’d say, ‘Come on, I’ll show you what to do. This is what you do. It’s real simple’ [laughs].
“In the old days, you’d scream your way out of it. Because some of the guys that were in charge didn’t necessarily know how to fix the problem, and if they couldn’t fix the problem, then ‘I’m going to scream at you till you fix the problem’ [laughs]. The screaming rolls downhill. I’ve seen some screaming in that mill.”
When the demolition of the mill began late in 2012, Pete often drove over to the old parking area to watch and to grieve. His marriage broke up, and his health deteriorated. In May 2015, at age sixty-five, he died. His death certificate may have said otherwise, but the cause of death was a broken heart.
Democrat, May 19, 1993.
“International Paper Announces Plan to Transform Its Business Portfolio and Performance,” International Paper news release, July 19, 2005.
Edith Tucker, “IP Owns Controlling Share of GPB,” Democrat, January 11, 2006; Donna Jordan, “Paper Mill Closing Comes at ‘Ironic Time,’” Lancaster Herald, January 6, 2006.