You Had a Job for Life Read online

  Dave Atkinson, “2005—a Roller Coaster Ride for Sure!!!!??,” Wausau Happenings, Summer 2005, 2.

  Dave Atkinson, “Times Are Changing—for the Good!!!,” Wausau Happenings, Autumn 2004, 2.

  “Wausau Paper Launches Strategic Timberland Sales,” Wausau Happenings, Summer 2005, 11.

  Dave Atkinson, “Unprecedented Energy Prices Cause Dramatic Shift in Groveton Operations!,” Wausau Happenings, Fall 2005, 2.

  Chapter Sixteen

  F THIS

  LATE IN AUGUST 2007, Dave Atkinson received an unexpected phone call from Wisconsin: “At that time I was traveling to Wausau about once a month for a staff meeting. I had a new boss, Dan Trettein, who called me and said, ‘Dave, can you come out for a special?’ I think I had just been there a week or two before. This was kind of a thorn in my side. You had to drive two hours to Manchester and catch a flight and go through Detroit or Chicago. There were no direct flights to central Wisconsin. So it was an eight-hour trip to travel. Eight hours out and eight hours back, that’s if you didn’t get weather. It meant I had to travel on a Sunday. I can remember being irritated; I said, ‘Dan, I was just there.’ ‘We really need you to come out.’ ‘OK, I’ll be there.’”

  “Dave,” Dan Trettein began, “I’ve got some bad news to tell you.” Wausau had decided to close the Groveton mill on December 31. Thunderstruck, Atkinson asked if Tom Howatt knew. Yes. “Something dramatic happened,” Atkinson reflected years later. “I believe it was the chairman of the board, San Orr, and the shareholders basically saying to Tom Howatt, the CEO, ‘Hey, this business is going in the wrong direction. Printing and writing—sales projections—it’s not growing, it’s shrinking.’ I know a lot of people blame Tom. I don’t. I know from conversations with him, Groveton was his baby. On my way back to the airport, I pulled into the corporate office and went in and saw Tom. It was an emotional meeting. I really think he was in a similar position to me. We commiserated about that. He said, ‘Dave this is the state of the business, and we need to contract. Groveton is efficient, but it’s far away.’ One hundred ten thousand tons being made, only sixty-five to seventy thousand tons a year being sold regionally. When diesel was not that expensive, it was less of a big deal. [Wausau] had to shed capacity.”

  Should Groveton have been the first mill closed by Wausau? “Absolutely not!” Atkinson insisted. “Tom Howatt did say that to me. But given the realities of where the corporate office was and geographically where the sales were, the efficiency of Groveton did not make up for the difference in shipment costs. They were trying to sell into a market that was shrinking.”

  Howatt, Trettein, and the Wausau board did not consult Dave Atkinson or alert him that they were contemplating shuttering Groveton. I asked Atkinson if it bothered him that such a momentous decision was made without local input. His answer surprised me: “The mere fact that I wasn’t consulted maybe even adds something that it was a decision that was made quickly and not the way any decision had ever been made in my years at Wausau. Tom may have wanted to insulate me from ultimately having to be part of the decision. I don’t think I would have had any influence. I think I’m glad I was insulated from it because it made me just like every other Groveton employee who I feel strong kinship to. That’s what got me through from October to December. ‘I heard on the street you’re not going to move. You’re staying?’ I was able to say in good conscience, ‘Yes, I am.’ I think that helped me live with myself. I never felt like I should have been consulted. I’m glad I wasn’t. As odd as that sounds.”

  Wausau’s board would not ratify the decision to close Groveton until mid-October. For the intervening two months Atkinson had to keep the “gut-wrenching” news to himself. “I certainly tell [my wife, Sharon],” Atkinson recalled. “I remember crying. I can feel myself getting emotional now, which is kind of ridiculous, but certainly, not hiding it from her. I couldn’t have anyway. In the mill, I never lied, but I was never truly candid for that two months ’cause it wasn’t for sure. Tom Howatt didn’t give me false hope, but he probably said, ‘We can’t announce, and you can’t talk about it openly.’ Because, a publicly traded company, and all those rules that exist, you can’t until it’s official. Honestly, those two months, as you ask me, they have to be a blur. I got through the day as best I could. I’m sure that employees noticed that I wasn’t on the floor as much, that I was in my office more. I know that I withdrew and probably was not myself, which probably indirectly sent a message to the force because, ‘Dave’s not acting the same; something’s up.’”

  Comptroller Norm Fortier and human resources director Greg Nolin were the only staff members Atkinson could inform because they needed to begin planning for the shutdown. “I guess we comforted each other as best as that can be,” he said ruefully. Pam Styles said, “I remember [Dave’s] wife saying he was just sick to death about it.”

  For Atkinson, September and October were “the worst two months of my career.” He had to carry on as if the mill had a future. When a big breach in the Brooklyn Dam was discovered that fall, he authorized its repair. Engineers Tom Bushey and his boss, Steve McMann, thought Atkinson was behaving in an uncharacteristically tightfisted manner. After one tense meeting, Bushey recalled: “My boss [said], ‘Get it done. Get it done right. Don’t waste money, but don’t spare any expense to get it right. We’re not going to go back here again.’ It’s funny, because I’ve asked Steve if he knew what was about to happen. He claims he didn’t. I remember Steve having to go to Dave to get approval for more money because we kept finding more and more hidden damage on that dam. I could tell he was stressed by the whole experience, and he would come back to me and reiterate: ‘Get it done, and get it done right. Get this place up and running.’ So boom, that’s what I did; we charged ahead; we got it done, and spent an enormous amount of money doing it in a short period of time. I don’t think that mill pond had been refilled and that mill back on river water for more than a couple of weeks when we finally found out that the place was shutting down.”

  “We were hearing certain rumors,” Sandy Mason, a paper machine crew member said, “but we were always told that they weren’t true. Late September, the mill’s going to close. Or some jobs are going; some are staying. Different rumors; it wasn’t all the same. Then we saw [in] the paper Dave Atkinson said, ‘The rumors weren’t true,’ so we had to go on that.”

  On Tuesday morning, October 23, 2007, Atkinson informed his management staff: “‘Hey guys, the company is coming in; it’s not good news.’ That was a difficult meeting because I was now Dan Trettein. The reaction from my staff, maybe an hour or two before the company plane came plowing in, was just like me in Wausau two months prior. ‘Are you crazy?’ ‘Does Tom Howatt know?’ Same questions.” That afternoon, Stu Carlson, senior vice president for administration, and Curt Schmidt, head of human resources, informed the mill’s 303 employees that the mill would close forever on December 31.

  Everyone knew the mill had been struggling, but no one expected a decision to close the mill had already been made. Pam Styles was expecting another quarterly briefing on the mill’s financial status. She recalled that when Carlson said, “I am sorry to report we’re closing the mill,” there was stunned silence. “I think a pin could have dropped on the floor,” she continued. “I remember one person standing up, and it was, ‘F this,’ and he walked out and slammed the door.”

  “When I walked into that conference room that day, I had the sense that there was some bad news coming, news about curtailment of the paper mill for a short period of time due to lack of orders,” Tom Bushey remembered. “Maybe an announcement that we need to trim a percentage of the workforce to stay in the black. Never dreamed it was going to be a flat-out, utter, shut-it-down. I don’t think anybody saw that coming. There was emotion like you wouldn’t believe. There was people in the room that stood up and got argumentative. There were a few people that stormed out of the room. A lot of people just cried. So many of us were shell-shocked. We tried to ask a
few questions about where everything was headed. And then this Schmidt guy did get it out there that there may be opportunities for some folks at some of the other mills.”

  Everyone asked, “Why Groveton?” “If they would have been looking out for the stockholders’ money, they would have shut the Brokaw mill down because [it] was not economically viable,” Bushey said. “It was an energy hog. Groveton had a tremendous amount of automation that Brokaw did not have. I believe there was some smoke and mirrors played as regards to which mill should have been shut down.”

  Atkinson agreed: “Don Paquette, who was a longtime shift supervisor in Groveton, said to me when he visited Brokaw for the first time, ‘Making paper in Groveton is an art and a science combined, especially with the new technology. Making paper in Brokaw, it’s an absolute miracle.’ Brokaw had good people, but they didn’t have modern equipment. If I were going to shut a mill down, it would have been Brokaw.”

  Many from Groveton thought the troubled Brainerd, Minnesota, mill acquired in 2004 should have been shut down. Atkinson thought Brainerd made “pretty decent paper,” certainly better than Brokaw’s product: “What did Brainerd have that Groveton didn’t? It had geographic proximity to the markets that they had, so it didn’t have an exorbitant shipping cost to get the product to the end user that Groveton had. I don’t want to sound like I’m a fan of the decision, but that’s why.”

  Murray Rogers and other officers of Local 61 were in Maryville, Indiana, at a Wausau Council meeting on October 23. Stu Carlson called and told him the news of the mill closing and offered to send a private jet for them. Rogers angrily declined: “I found my way over here; I’ll find my way back.” When he returned to Groveton, he confronted Atkinson: “‘You knew when I boarded that plane that this was going down.’ ‘Yes, I did.’ I said, ‘How dare you do this to the union, knowing that we spent a couple of thousand dollars on airline tickets and hotel rooms to go to a Wausau Council meeting when you knew this mill was going down?’ He reimbursed the union for what was spent for that trip. That’s the type of guy Dave is.”

  United States labor law requires companies closing plants to negotiate a severance package with the union, a process called “effects bargaining.” Because of Local 61’s lack of leverage, Rogers referred to the process as “effects begging.” The Wausau severance package stipulated that on December 31 all but thirty-eight of the union jobs would be terminated. A skeletal force of mostly maintenance workers would continue to work at the mill until May 2, 2008. Workers could use seniority to bump for those jobs, although Wausau reserved the right to select the employees it wished to retain after December 31 to maintain waste treatment, utilities, and to perform maintenance.

  Wausau would pay severance only if production and safety standards were sustained right to the end, and there was no vandalism. Workers who quit before December 31 (unless given permission by Wausau) and those who were fired (“discharged for cause”) lost their severance pay and benefits. Workers would be paid for unused and accrued vacation and would retain health and dental insurance until March 1, 2008, or, if working at the mill after that date, until their jobs ended. Those with less than ten years of service at the mill received four weeks’ salary at the employee’s normal hourly wage for a forty-hour week. Employees with ten to twenty years of seniority received eight weeks’ severance, and those with more than twenty years of service received twelve weeks of severance pay.

  The union fought unsuccessfully for the deal IP had given to the Groveton Paper Board employees two years earlier—one week of severance pay for each year of seniority up to twenty years. However, the union could not strike or threaten a work stoppage because Wausau would simply walk away from the mill. The union representatives were so angry over the effects bargaining package that they refused to sign the agreement, leaving only president Murray Rogers and the International representative to sign. Stu Carlson, Curt Schmidt, Dave Atkinson, and Greg Nolin signed for Wausau.

  During this painful time, Rogers said, Local 61 did not get much help from the International, its parent union: “That guy was getting ready to retire. He didn’t do us any real favors in this whole thing. The International kind of went away. I felt that as soon as they found out that the dues were going away, they kind of stepped out of it.” Rogers was grateful for contributions of over $2,000 to the food bank from locals around the country.

  Rogers and his fellow negotiators had erroneously assumed “that anybody that was sixty-two after that mill went down would be allowed to collect full pension.” “That’s a kick,” he said. “It was our assumption that got us into trouble. But it was too late.” Bruce Blodgett turned sixty-two shortly after the mill shut down, and he took his pension. By claiming it before age sixty-five, he lost one-half of 1 percent per month: “They got me for 18 percent, so they got me for about four hundred bucks. By the time they got done with me, when I cut my wife in for half of my pension, that took me a hundred forty bucks a month to do that. I think I wound up with $1,050, $1,060 for a pension where I should have got $1,473.”

  Dave Atkinson sympathized with Murray Rogers’s unhappiness with the severance package but suggested Local 61 could have done worse. Not long after the mill shut down, the stock market crashed. “Manufacturers across the country were announcing massive layoffs, massive shutdowns everywhere,” Atkinson said. “The news picks up on stories about corporate America and Wall Street, and these poor people are left with nothing, and there’s no severance. I’m always looking for the silver lining. Had we waited a little longer [to close the mill], and we had been caught up in that whole thing, there would have been less of a perceived obligation from the corporate office to provide the severance that they did for the folks in Groveton. I really believe that. Then the severance package given to the Groveton workforce would have been worse.”

  Rogers began working with the New Hampshire Employment Services and Southern New Hampshire Services (SNHS) to help everyone, whether union or salaried, write résumés and search for jobs. He credited Ron Giroux of SNHS with keeping him calm: “He’s the one who said, ‘You’re going to go through three stages. You’re going to be mad. Then you’re going to grieve. But then you’ve got to get on with life. The longer you stay mad, the less chance you’re going to get a job because somebody else that doesn’t stay mad is going to move up. You need to get on with life and do what you’ve got to do.’”

  With an eye to future employment, Rogers advised his fellow workers, “The best thing they could do was go out of there with their heads held high running that machine to the fullest capability because they were now trying to be marketable. Show these people that are watching—because everybody’s watching this mill—that you can do a good job. They ran it to just about setting records to the last day. They did a good job.”

  With the regional economy in free-fall, there were few jobs available for anyone, and scarcely any that paid comparable wages. Job specialization in the mill also worked against workers finding a new job. When the mill closed, generalists, such as maintenance workers, enjoyed great advantages finding decent-paying jobs. There were no jobs operating a paper machine or a ream wrapping machine. Some workers went on disability because of age or weight. Rogers thought that fewer than twenty former mill workers moved out of the area to find work. However, they were probably among the younger employees.

  Mill workers who were over fifty-five found it especially difficult. “You go out there, and you’ve got a little of this gray on you, the guys will say ‘Beat it,’ unless you’ve got some kind of a trade that they want,” Bruce Blodgett explained. “They’re not going to hire these guys. A lot of them are trying to get by on unemployment or keeping unemployment until they can get to be sixtyish, at least.”

  The final two months at the mill were an eerie time. Heartbreak, anger, fear, bewilderment, desperation, and gallows humor settled into a kind of psychological numbness. For ten more weeks Groveton paper workers had to continue to operate machinery safely and make hi
gh-quality paper. “I thought I was going to retire from there. Didn’t work out that way,” Sandy Mason said with a bittersweet laugh. For Tom Bushey, it was a career, not merely a job: “I’m sure I’d still be there tomorrow—today—if the place was running.”

  “It was sad,” Atkinson said. “It was hard, certainly, to get up between August and October. Once the news was shared, it was probably easier because now I wasn’t holding this burden, and I could go out on the floor again and be me. From October to December there was a lot of activity related to the shutdown that kept you focused. The hourly workforce were superb. I can’t stress enough how orderly and proud and well the workforce in Groveton shut the operation down. Sabotage, sour grapes—no. I was doing a lot of communicating about, ‘I’m with you guys. We’re all in this together. Let’s go down proud.’” He quickly added, “They would have anyway.”

  “I put in a lot of hours because a lot of the guys were finding other jobs and were taking them,” Sandy Mason recalled. “So you got a lot of overtime. By December I was making a pretty good paycheck.”

  Although Wausau no longer wanted the mill, its midwestern mills coveted some of Groveton’s equipment. Tom Bushey remembered: “The announcement was no more than made, and then we had an influx of people from the other [Wausau] mills basically coming to start picking meat off the bones. I spent most of my time sharing drawings and file information, technical information on various pieces of machinery that we had at the mill. The converting equipment, they obviously had intentions of taking that completely out of the mill to some of their other sites. The Brokaw mill was not able to make some of the grades that we were making in Groveton as efficiently as we were making them. We had folks from the Brokaw mill come out and spend time with us trying to understand how we achieved such low energy and water consumption numbers. I had to give them the inside philosophy on that.”