You Had a Job for Life Page 31

  Joe Berube was set to retire early in 2008. Although he had his pension, he worried about the community’s future: “There’s not a lot of opportunities today for any of the younger generation, that’s for sure. If they want a job once they graduate [from high school], they’re going to have to relocate somewhere.”

  Something else was lost when the mill died. “[The mill] was like another family,” Pam Styles thought. When there was a death in the family, an illness, or a tragedy, the mill community came together. Dave Atkinson concurred: “There was always an envelope [in the lab]—a collection for someone who had a fire, or chemotherapy, or whatever. Significant collections. Each Christmas and/or Thanksgiving, [James River and Wausau] would buy a turkey or a ham for everyone and give it as a thank you. Many of the employees would say, ‘I’m here to get my turkey, but I want to give it to the Catholic church [or a local charity].’ Typically, we’d order thirty or forty more turkeys, and Wausau would make a donation to Meals on Wheels or whatever. There was a great philanthropic family atmosphere at the mill. It didn’t matter—union, salaried, there was an envelope there.”

  Five years after the mill closed, Tom Bushey worried about the future of the community: “I don’t know what it’s gonna take to reinvent this area. I’m a Christian guy, and every day since the mill closed, I’ve prayed to be a part of the redevelopment of this area. I’m forty-four years old, still young. Definitely could move out of this area. I’d like to see my hometown come back to life, to have some semblance of a community. Because that’s what it always was. Growing up, you pretty much knew the inside of every home in the town because it was like one great big family. Now, with the closing of the mill, people aren’t coming together as much as they used to. I feel like the fabric of the town is unraveling a little bit each day. It’s just hard to see it. Three hundred and fifty people coming together every day, and now, boom—everybody’s scattered to the four corners of the state and beyond, trying to find employment.”

  In nearly every interview, former mill workers expressed bitterness toward the last mill owner. Most of them cited the covenant as the cruelest blow. “I feel that Wausau did a gross injustice to this community [saying] that the paper machines couldn’t make paper on this facility,” Roger Caron said. “I think they were afraid of the competition because of the nature of the people that work here. We had an excellent workforce and a can-do attitude. They probably saw us as a threat, but that should have been illegal. We live in a forest-based part of the country, and it would almost be like ‘you can’t make flour in Kansas’ or something. To me it was wrong.”

  Pam Styles recalled the grief in the final weeks: “I’m surprised that a lot of people didn’t do any damage to the mill because of them closing it that way. I believe there was some stealing of stuff that was supposed to have been left there. I think everyone has a lot of hard feelings about it, the way they did it. What bothered most everyone is the way they did it so that we couldn’t survive with another mill there. I think if they had left it so it could be sold to another papermaking company, people wouldn’t have felt as bad, at least that they have a chance to survive. I thought it was a raw deal.”

  “I think that Wausau should have a lot of guilty consciences for what they have done, especially that thing about never making paper in that mill again,” Joan Breault said in 2010. “That has to be plain vindictiveness. Just meanness to do that. They had to know what impact that would have on this area. I don’t blame all their bosses. I think David Atkinson is one of the top guys I’ve ever known. He tried his darnedest to help the people of Groveton. He fought to keep that mill open. Nobody could ever blame him for anything wrong like that. He’s a good guy. It was the higher-ups in Wisconsin—Tom Howatt and some of them. It certainly has had an impact on this area. Not a good one. I’m glad I was retired. Right now, I’ve got a son and a grandson out of work. When my son got done as a paper machine tender [after thirty years], he took a college course on welding. He can’t get a job around here. I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

  Bruce Blodgett grudgingly defended Wausau’s right to impose the covenant: “It’s a dirty deal, but they owned the mill. What do you want to do? Hey, they own it; so, kind of a lousy hand to get dealt to you, but how are you going to beat it? I think there’s crooked deals in it, sure. But when it comes down to it, if you decide you want to sell your house, I can’t tell you not to sell it or who to sell to.”

  “I can’t even imagine such a thing [as the covenant]. Can’t imagine it,” a livid Jim Wemyss said. “I can’t even imagine how they thought it up. Somebody must have hated Groveton. I don’t know what their thinking behind it was.”

  A great many people contrasted Jim Wemyss with Wausau. Louise Caouette suggested: “It’s real easy to say ‘Wausau,’ because that’s a group; it’s a board of directors. I think the difference was, when it was Wemyss, the buck stopped with him. Why preserve the Wisconsin mill and let Groveton go? There is a sense of community in Brokaw with the management because that’s where they live, that’s where the shots were being called. They could distance themselves from Groveton. They didn’t have to face somebody on the street with a decision that was made in Wisconsin. Where if it was locally owned . . .”

  Sylvia Stone worked in the accounting department at the mill from 1952 to 1978. “They ruined our town,” she said. “I don’t understand why they ever did such a thing. Many corporations don’t think of the people; you’re a number. I feel that I was more than a number working for Groveton Papers.”

  Wemyss wouldn’t have done this, Thurman Blodgett asserted: “I’ve seen the time when salesmen couldn’t even sell paper. It wasn’t very long before his plane would take off, and he’d be gone for a little while, and pretty soon he’d come back. The paper machines would start running again, and they was shipping her out as fast as they could. He’d undersell ’em to keep people working.”

  Several former workers remained convinced that, as Zo Cloutier phrased it, “If [Jimmy Wemyss] was running that place today, it probably would still be running.” Joan Breault suggested that Wausau’s treatment of the town might cause some people to reevaluate their opinions of Wemyss: “I bet there are people who used to condemn the Wemysses for stuff, but I bet they wish they had the Wemysses here instead of Wausau. The Wemysses never left the people high and dry like Wausau did.”

  Jim Wemyss agreed: “You think I’d have allowed this company to be shut down if I’d been working? Are you crazy? It never would have happened.” He noted that tissue is too expensive to ship more than five hundred miles: “If I’d kept it as a family business, I’d have two big high-speed tissue machines running there right now, on secondary fiber making Vanity Fair products and dominating the goddamn whole East Coast like I did before. No problem in my mind. But you can’t do this till you’re a hundred years old. You have to turn it over to somebody someday. And I felt at seventy-five it was time for me to get the hell out.”

  There’s the rub: If I’d kept it as a family business. The Groveton Papers Company ceased to exist as an independent, family-owned business in June 1968 when Jim Jr. and his father merged with Diamond International. Even though Jim Wemyss ran the mill for Diamond for another fifteen years, Sir James Goldsmith’s hostile takeover of Diamond exposed the illusion that the mill remained under local control after 1968.

  Mill demolition and Cape Horn. (Courtesy Doug White)

  Jim Wemyss blamed Goldsmith and Wall Street for the death of the Groveton mill. Certainly Goldsmith’s rapacious capitalism accelerated the demise of the region’s paper industry, but by the 1980s the future of northern New England’s paper industry was already bleak. Signs of trouble had become manifest during the 1970s. The shocks of that decade’s two oil crises, the costs of cleaning up past pollution and reducing future emissions, combined with growing competition from bigger, faster, newer mills, placed the old paper mills of New England at a competitive disadvantage. As Fortune 500 corporations swallowed up New England m
ills that formerly had been owned by people with some connection to the region, decisions over the fates of mill-dependent communities were increasingly made from afar.

  Between 1988, when Goldsmith sold off Diamond’s former timberlands, and 2005, most of the eight million acres formerly owned by paper companies in northern New England had been sold off to hedge funds, real estate investment trusts, and other speculators who typically log intensively before selling off within five to ten years. A small percentage of these lands was acquired by the public or by private, nonprofit conservation groups.

  In the past two decades, at least ten paper mills have closed or ceased making paper in northern New England and New York. In Maine alone, there has been a 62 percent decline in paper mill jobs since 1990. Logging jobs declined 24 percent in the same period, and sawmill jobs diminished by 39 percent. Real wages for those lucky to have a job in the depressed region have declined. Many rural townships are barely surviving.1 These desperate communities are forced to close schools and cut services. They are faced with choices such as accept a prison, a casino, a toxic dump, or go bankrupt.

  Late in 2005, Lloyd Irland, a leading forest economist in Maine, wrote: “My own conclusions from scanning the economic landscape is that the U.S. and Canadian wood sectors are in for a prolonged ‘Dark Time,’ likely to last decades.”2 The spate of paper mill closures in northern New England since then bears out his observation.

  Wausau shut down its Brokaw mill in 2012 and Brainerd a year later. It sold its Rhinelander and Mosinee mills in 2013 under pressure from a hedge fund that bought a huge chunk of Wausau stock in 2011. If, in 2007, Wausau had spared Groveton and shuttered Brainerd or one of its Wisconsin mills instead, it is unlikely that Groveton would have escaped its unhappy fate for long. Almost certainly, Groveton would have been shut down by 2013 because of uncontrollable global economic forces. The covenant Wausau placed on the Groveton mill was an ugly reminder of the power of Wall Street–financed corporations’ power to destroy rural resource communities. Nevertheless, the covenant probably didn’t much matter because, as Louise Caouette observed: “It’s inevitable that the [New England] paper industry is going to die anyway. I think that long-term the whole community—Coos County—has got to find a way to diversify itself. At some point, the community was going to have to deal with the death of the industry.”

  “It’s a dying industry,” Dave Atkinson said with resignation in 2012. “Even in China, the printing paper market annual tons per year sold is shrinking. The world market is shrinking. It’s going to continue because of the e-media.”

  “It’s time for Groveton to move on,” Bill Astle asserted two years before the mill was demolished. “Just as there wasn’t always a paper mill in Groveton, and there was life in Groveton before the paper mill, there will be life again.”

  “I feel I was fortunate to have a job,” the ever-feisty Pauline Labrecque summed up forty years at the mill. “I wasn’t one that because I wanted the night off I would call in sick. I was there. They could depend on me. That makes me feel good. And if they called me today and said, ‘Paulie, we’re going to bring back some of them napkin machines on Number 4 here; are you willing to come back to work?’ In a heartbeat. . . . . . . . . . . . Yup. . . . . . . . . . . . In a heartbeat.”

  Mitch Lansky, “Beyond the Beauty Strip: A 20th Year Retrospective,” 30–31. PDF, written in 2012, can be downloaded at www.meepi.org/lif/BTBS20yearslater.doc.

  Lloyd Irland, “Maine’s Forest Products Sector and Regional Disparities,” in Spreading Prosperity to the “Other Maines”: Reflections on Regional Disparities, ed. Lisa Pohlmann and David Vail (Maine Center for Economic Policy, November 2005), 111.

  Postscript

  THE DAY WHEN CORPORATE AMERICA DOESN’T RUN US

  IN ONE of my conversations with Dave Atkinson, I had expressed indignation that Wausau’s board never consulted him when it was deciding the mill’s fate: You can see where I’m coming from. A community has been ravaged by decisions from away, and they didn’t consult us on those decisions. It’s just this absentee—having kind of life-and-death control over our community. He replied: “Yup. That’s what sucks about the corporate world. What’s important is quarterly earnings, not long-term. That is Wall Street driven. Do I feel hurt or pissed that I wasn’t consulted? Not really. I never felt that way.”

  I persisted: As an outsider, I think it’s wrong that decisions are made without consulting those who have to bear the brunt of them. “I agree,” he replied. “But that’s today’s society. That’s the Wall Street quarterly earnings society. I look forward to the day when corporate America doesn’t run us.”

  The mill has been demolished. The voices of many who helped me tell its story have been silenced by time. Though the active life of the mill ended a decade ago, the area’s economy remains depressed. The story of the Groveton mill community cannot end on such a despairing note. To answer questions posed in the introduction we must examine the economic lessons former mill workers taught me about the successes and failures of the mill.

  WHY WAS THE MILL PROSPEROUS FOR SO MANY DECADES? The gorgeous landscape of the Upper Connecticut River Valley provided abundant wood fiber and flowing fresh waters essential for making paper. An unusually loyal, capable, and versatile workforce kept the mill running through wartime, floods, and economic hard times. In its heyday, the mill produced a diverse array of paper products—from fine papers to tissues to paperboard. A strong community, which many likened to a second family, provided support in times of adversity. The mill’s postwar prosperity occurred under local ownership that was committed to the community—even when the old-school owners were throwing their coats on the floor and screaming at supervisors.

  The American economy enjoyed its greatest period of economic growth and rising standard of living during those postwar decades. Access to cheap energy prior to 1973 kept mill costs down. Government policies such as protections for unions and a steep progressive tax system reduced inequality of wealth in the United States to its lowest point in the last 150 years.

  WHAT CAUSED THE MILL’S DEMISE? The decline of the mill after Sir James Goldsmith’s takeover of Diamond International coincided with profound changes in national politics and global economic forces. After 1980, the United States government repeatedly reduced the taxes on corporations and the wealthiest Americans. Large corporations, abetted by government policies, successfully weakened labor unions. Global energy prices soared after the oil crises of 1973 and 1979. Free-trade agreements that were ratified in the early 1990s forced mills such as Groveton to compete in commodity markets with newer, more modern, bigger mills located where workers were paid less and environmental protections were lax, or nonexistent. Significantly, the period of decline in important sectors of manufacturing in the United States coincided with a sharp increase in the inequality of wealth in the United States and a weakening of the democratic institutions that nurtured the postwar narrowing of wealth inequality. Today, the gap between the wealthiest and the rest of us is more extreme in the United States than in Europe, and it is worse than it was during the notorious Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.1

  Employees of the Groveton mill could not control rising energy prices, falling commodity paper prices, or Wausau’s diminished investment in the mill. Dave Atkinson understood this, and throughout those final years, he exhorted the mill workforce to focus on “controllables” such as reducing energy and water use, the generation of broke paper, customer complaints, and workplace accidents: “We need to stay focused on what we can control. We can’t control the market. All we can control is how efficiently, how cost-effectively we work. Focus on that, and we’ll be OK.” Mill workers responded with a variety of ingenious, inexpensive ways to reduce the amount of water and energy needed to make paper. They probably prolonged the life of the mill a bit, but they could not prevent a variety of uncontrollable global economic forces from dooming the mill.

  WHAT LESSONS CAN CITIZENS OF THE GROVETON RE
GION LEARN FROM THE SUCCESSES AND FAILURES OF THE MILL AS THEY STRIVE TO BUILD A VIBRANT LOCAL ECONOMY? The struggle with controllables and uncontrollables suggests an important economic lesson: To build a strong regional economy that meets local needs, communities such as Groveton need to discover ways to transform uncontrollable threats into controllable assets. The path to a revived economy begins with an examination of ways to control uncontrollable global forces that pose obstacles to economic recovery.

  Energy Prices: Local communities can control their vulnerability to energy price fluctuations by avoiding—or at least minimizing—economic activities that require massive amounts of energy. Conservation, efficiency, and avoidance of wasteful energy uses are key elements in a strategy to diminish greenhouse gas emissions and lower overall energy costs. Local business and industry should, whenever possible, derive energy from decentralized, local, low-carbon sources such as low-impact hydropower and small-scale wood, wind, and solar. The income from locally owned energy production recirculates in the hometown economy instead of disappearing into absentee coffers. “Green energy” projects, however, must truly be “green” and low carbon, and they must be coupled with the decommissioning of fossil fuel capacity. Otherwise, they merely expand energy production without reducing greenhouse gases.

  Technological Arms Race: The Groveton mill declined when its absentee owners curtailed investment in state-of-the-art technology. Groveton ought to concentrate on building an economy that relies on smaller-scale, lower-cost technology that requires much less energy to operate. This simple, local business model diminishes dependence on Wall Street investors and global energy markets.

  Commodity Production: Paper Board and Wausau could not operate profitably when commodity prices declined and energy and pulp prices rose. A new economy should encourage low-tech manufacturing of niche, value-added products that fetch higher prices and cannot be replicated in other regions.