Another Maine paper mill is closing its doors. More than 200 workers in Madison will lose their jobs when the mill ceases operations by late May.
The closure comes just months after Madison Paper successfully argued that the U.S. impose a duty on competing Canadian paper. But that attempt to level the playing field wasn’t enough to withstand other forces that are driving the mill’s closure.
A little before 10 a.m. Monday, Mike Croteau was called into a meeting with the management at the Madison Paper mill. Croteau, the president of the United Steel Workers local 36 union, says he’s still reeling from the news that was delivered.
“Frustration. Anger,” he says. “This is my first time in a facility ever having to go through something like this, and I represent over 120 people. I’m going, ‘What do I do now?’“
The mill has struggled recently. Last year, hourly workers were laid off for two weeks. Since January, the mill has curtailed its operations schedule from 24/7 to a five-day, 40-hour workweek. At the same time, Croteau says the mill made improvements to its machinery and seemed to be performing well.
Despite these efforts, parent company UPM said in a written statement that the mill can’t withstand a market that’s currently flooded with the glossy supercalendered magazine paper it produces.
“There’s just too much supply, and not enough demand,” Croteau says.
He says the market was flooded, in part, by the Hawkesbury Paper Mill in Canada. That mill was troubled too, until the provincial government injected millions of dollars to revive it a few years ago.
The Madison Paper mill and Verso Paper argued that the government aid amounted to unfair subsidies that put Maine paper mills at a disadvantage. Last December, the International Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Commerce agreed, and ordered that duties be assessed on Canadian supercalendered paper.
But clearly, says Croteau, it wasn’t soon enough.
“We took two years of pain and suffering and did what we had to do to fight this case, and we won it, and we thought this was a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel,” he says.
Democratic state Rep. Jeff McCabe of Skowhegan is among the local lawmakers who are calling for support for millworkers and their families. McCabe says he’s also angered by U.S. trade policy.
“We’ve created a mess here in this country with approving trade agreements that don’t benefit manufacturing, like the Madison mill,” he says.
McCabe is calling on Maine’s Congressional Delegation to take a harder line on trade agreements to ensure they don’t take jobs out of the U.S.
Independent U.S. Sen. Angus King says he’s already on board.
“I’m very concerned about it,” he says. “That’s why both Susan Collins and I voted against the so-called fast track authority a couple of months ago.”
King and Collins sent a letter to the U.S. commerce secretary Monday morning, asking the department to dispatch a team to rural Maine to help create economic strategies in areas hit by mill closures.
“What we’re trying to generate here is what I’d call an all-hands-on-deck approach to trying to assist this region,” King says. “It’s been struck by the economic equivalent of a hurricane.”
In a written statement, the Maine Pulp and Paper Association insists that pulp and papermaking is not a dying industry, but is asking the Legislature to prevent further closures to Maine’s remaining seven mills by adding natural gas pipeline capacity and decreasing the tax burden on businesses.
Gov. Paul LePage has also pointed to taxes and energy costs as obstacles to job preservation in Maine. More immediately, Maine’s Department of Labor will deploy a Rapid Response Team to assist the Madison Paper mill’s employees.
“And we identify what their future plans are,” says department spokesperson Julie Rabinowitz. She says the team can help workers find new jobs or retrain for a different career, but admits that it can be a challenge to find job opportunities in rural parts of the state.
“And obviously, it affects additional jobs beyond just the mill,” she says. “There’s also the lumber and the folks driving the trucks to deliver the paper and the pulp.”
Rabinowitz says the Labor Department does have a lot of experience with these situations. Since 2000, 11 pulp, paper and paperboard mills in Maine have closed and the industry has shed 6,000 jobs.
