New West Feature
Life After Smurfit-Stone: One Year After the Company Leaves the Company Town
More than 400 people lost their jobs last December when the mill in Frenchtown, Montana, shut down. Here, two stories about trying to pick up the pieces.By Justin Franz, 12-14-10
Tim Steigers, who worked more than 30 years at Smurfit-Stone Container, still drives past the hard hats that hang there a year after the closure. Photo by Justin Franz.
With hands worn from three decades of labor, Tim Steigers slides a small metal wedge out of an axle frame and turns toward his toolbox. Opening a drawer, he aligns the chunk of old steel – once the property of Smurfit-Stone Container – among the others of various sizes.
Steigers, 54, peers inside a frame, trying to figure out what to do next. Even with decades of craft experience, this is a complex riddle. Each casting and gear removed is met with another and another, like an endless Russian nesting doll.
He’s in the middle of a large garage at the University of Montana’s College of Technology, working slowly, making every move like an experienced chess player. Meanwhile, a group of college-aged students swarm around him, attacking projects with the goal of finishing early on this Friday afternoon.
Across from Steigers, two kids bang away at their axle, trying everything and anything to crack its spell. “I think there’s a better wrench for that,” Steigers says, smiling.
He is among the oldest students in the diesel mechanics class, which also includes with five other former employees of Smurfit-Stone, the plant that closed one year ago after a half-century of operations in Frenchtown, just west of Missoula.
Its shutdown was the latest – and largest – in a series of mill closures in western Montana related to a struggling forest products industry. In July 2008, Stimson Lumber Company shut down its mill in Bonner, leaving 100 people out of work. A year later, Plum Creek Timber Company shut down mills in Pablo and Evergreen, leaving 150 people out of work.
And on Dec. 14, 2009, Smurfit-Stone Container announced it would shut down its Frenchtown liner board mill before the end of the year, leaving 417 people jobless.
***
Steigers was born in Lewiston, Idaho, but he didn’t stay there long. In August 1957, Steigers’ father missed his son’s first birthday because he made the five-hour drive north for an interview at a new mill, which would later be bought by Smurfit-Stone. On Labor Day weekend, the family packed up its home in Idaho and headed north, where Steigers, his two brothers and one sister would grow up in the shadow of the mill and be “raised on pulp mill money,” he said. The massive mill would become one of the most recognizable landmarks west of Missoula along Interstate 90, its plumes of white smoke billowing into the sky for over 50 years.
Like many people in the area, Steigers and his two brothers followed their father to the mill, starting in September 1978. He became a laborer in the chemical reviving area and eventually a boiler operator. Although it was hard work, it was work he enjoyed. In the early 2000s, he got into an apprentice program to become a pipe fitter and maintainer, where he would spend most of his days repairing and improving the intricate system of steam pipes that crisscrossed the site.
Smurfit-Stone in better days. Photo by Justin Franz.
Employing more than 1,000 people at one time, the mill had some of the highest paying jobs in the Missoula area, with an average annual wage above $70,000. That, along with good benefits, made the mill an attractive place for job seekers, including Roy Houseman.
Having spent six summers working in Alaska at a fish processing warehouse, the Great Falls native and 2003 UM graduate thought the mill would be a good fit for him. Starting in 2005, Houseman worked as a laborer and, soon after, became involved with the union – United Steel Workers Hellgate Local 885. A few years later, he was elected treasurer, then president.
One of the people who nominated him was Stiegers, who hoped a new union leader could bring stability to the place where he had worked for more than 30 years, the place he hoped to retire from, regardless of rumors.
“Some people said the mill is going to shut down in the future and I always thought that we have the raw materials here, we make a good product, we’re not going to shutdown,” Stiegers said.
***
The morning of Dec. 14, 2009, didn’t start out special – gray, cold and snowy. Housemen woke up at 7 a.m., as his cell phone vibrated nearby with the sixth call that morning.
“We’ve got a meeting at 8. It doesn’t sound good,” the union chairman said on the other end of the line.
Houseman instantly thought the worse. The Frenchtown mill had three paper machines, the newest built in 1981, the year Houseman was born. One had been shut down in the early 2000s and another a few years later. Both resulted in significant labor cuts, and now the company had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Houseman had little hope as he got in his truck and lit a cigarette for the drive in.
At about 8 a.m. he pulled into the parking lot, got out of his truck and walked into the main office.
He headed for the conference room, where other union officials were already waiting at a long wooden table that had been there since Champion ownership. It had been a staple for decades and as Houseman said “no one builds a table like that anymore.” The only blemishes on its polished finish were chips from a pen’s edge, nervously flicked by the union president when Smurfit-Stone management entered the room that day.
A dozen or so people gathered there, including executives who came from headquarters to make the announcement to local management and government officials.
“Today Smurfit-Stone has made a decision to close the facility,” management told union representatives, before sliding a piece of paper across the table with the formal announcement that mill operations would end on Dec. 31.
Houseman spoke up. He said they were making a poor decision, that they hadn’t offered an opportunity for a renegotiation. That they made a good product. But there was nothing he could have said that would have changed their minds.
On the other side of the building, Steigers and an apprentice walked into the break room near the workshop for a coffee break. Nearby a manager watched.
“Well, you’re not going to get to finish your apprenticeship,” he said. “They’re shutting the mill down.”
Steigers was stunned by the news, as word quickly spread throughout the mill. A few moments later a foreman came in and asked everyone to stay in the room for a few moments after break. It was there that he officially told them what they already knew.
Houseman spent the rest of the day walking the plant, talking to workers, many of whom knew the mill as their only employer.
“You realize that all the conversations you had and all the efforts you did to try and keep that place running was not enough,” Houseman said. “You still had to face a lot of people and tell them that they are going to have to change something that they’ve done for 20 to 30 years.”
Opinions ranged from acceptance to anger, with some thinking it was a move by the company to break the union. But work had to continue, Steigers said, even if now the only job was to keep the mill operational for the next two weeks. No more improvements would be made to equipment.
“If you wanted to work, you had to find something to do yourself,” Steigers said.
Many took this course of action, while some began to find ways to help themselves when the plant did close. At least one person started spending much of his time in the shop practicing welding. Steigers, however, kept after the numerous steam pipes. Even with the end near, he found pride in his work.
“A craftsman is a craftsman, you know, he wants to do a good job,” he said. “If you don’t do the best work you can do, how do you look at yourself in the mirror?”
Toward the end of the work day, Houseman headed back to his truck and drove into town to speak to the Missoula City Council; he was a new member, elected a few weeks earlier.
As he entered the council chambers – a spacious, rarely filled room – the city clerk announced various committee meetings before Mayor John Engen announced the time for public comment.
Although he had been able to keep his emotions in check throughout the day, the realization of what had happened began to hit him as he approached the podium.
“Hello, my name is Roy Houseman, president of United Steel Workers Local 885 and councilmen-elect in Ward Two. I’m coming to inform you guys today that a meeting was called between Smurfit-Stone and United Steel Workers… They are planning on closing the facility,” he said.
As he looked across the room, his voice began to tremble. “It’s been a long day… I’m sorry,” he said, holding tears back.
Trying to regain composure, he whispered a struggled plea of support and thanks before turning from the podium and leaving council chambers. In the bathroom, he threw water on his face and grabbed a towel before heading back to his truck. And back to the mill.
As the temperature dropped and snow whipped through the long canyons of the mill, Houseman set out on a trip he made dozens of times in the last two years. Leaving the main office, he headed for the core complex where the three massive paper machines were housed.
The air changed little as the cold and dead No. 1 and No. 2 paper machines sat lifeless. Houseman walked along dusty cement toward the light and the still-operating No. 3 machine.
Hundreds of feet long, the machine whined and spinned as thousands of feet of brown paper flew through its core. Steam, heat and humidity erupted from the massive lime green contraption that looked everything like a kid’s Erector Set dreams. Walkways and ladders climbed its complex exterior as workers scurried about in the eleventh hour.
“People did their job, they still went about it,” Houseman said. “They had a solidarity there that they would remember.”
***
The weeks following the announcement where mournful. With no more upgrades or projects, Steigers kept after the steam traps.
Two weeks later, he gathered his tools, hung his hat on the fence outside and left for the last time. A year later, the finality of that day is what he remembers most.
“You knew you weren’t going to see these people again that you had spent 30 of your years with,” he said. “They’re like family.”
The following months were filled with uncertainty, he said, having lost the “normalcy” that made up the last three decades.
“It was hard. It has to be one of the harder things I’ve done in life,” he said. “To lose a job to no fault of mine. No fault of anybody out there at the mill… How do you deal with that?”
The only structure in his life were the classes he took at the Lifelong Learning Center in Missoula, made available by the Trade Adjustment Assistance Act. The courses included ways to deal with the loss of a job and how to go back to college. He also tried to find a new job, but all of his applications were denied.
In May, he decided to go back to school to study diesel mechanics.
For Houseman, the decision had come earlier. Just days after the shutdown, he began to put the paperwork together to go back to UM, this time for a Master’s in public administration. Within a month he was back in class after being away from school for seven years.
Having more free time also meant he could focus on his new job as city councilman. But free time didn’t mean easy times and the months that followed were financially tough for him and his wife.
“I would love to be making $20 an hour and working 40 hours a week with a group of people who supported me,” he said. “To say that I would not want to work out there is wrong.”
The feeling’s the same for Steigers, who said even months after he left the mill, he still had dreams about it. In August when his girlfriend asked what he wanted for his birthday, he had only one answer.
“I just want my job back,” he said.
***
But Steigers and Houseman aren’t the only ones dealing with the decision made in a boardroom thousands of miles away.
Smurfit-Stone’s Frenchtown mill was one of the largest industrial employers in the state and in Frenchtown, it provided almost a quarter of the town’s tax base.
“When you look at the economics side, it’s like taking an arm off,” said Patrick Barkey, director of the UM Bureau of Buisness and Economic Research.
According to a press release from the bureau, released soon after the announcement, the closure will have lasting effects on the Missoula area. Besides the initial 417 jobs lost at the mill, the report estimated that in the years to follow, more than 1,000 jobs could be lost.
“Markets don’t shed any tears for a specific city,” Barkey said.
It was fact realized by Randy Cline, the school superintendent in Frenchtown, as soon as he heard the news.
According to Cline, Smurfit-Stone paid 22 percent of the school’s annual budget, or about $825,000. That amount will likely drop in 2010, since the company will pay fewer property taxes for the inoperable mill.
But money isn’t the only thing lacking in the school district, according to Cline. Since 1985 the school had consistently seen a 2-percent increase in students every year. In that time, it went from Class C to Class A, an unheard-of growth in Montana. But this year when the school reopened in the fall, it did so with 60 fewer students, most of them from families who moved away after the mill closed, said Cline.
The story is the same in the Frenchtown Rural Fire District, according to Chief John Bibler. Like the school, taxes from Smurfit-Stone made up more than 20 percent of the department’s budget. With more than 80 percent of the budget going to staff salaries, Bibler said that once the money from the mill does stop, layoffs will be a real possibility, forcing the department to rely more on volunteers. For now, Bibler focuses on making due with what they have.
“There’s been so many rumors about the mill in the last year – that it’s been sold or this and that – that if I spent all my time worrying about it, then I’d never get anything done,” he said.
According to Barkey, what’s happening in Frenchtown and Missoula is just another example of a struggling wood products industry in western Montana and the region. Whether the area economy can recover from the shutdown has yet to be seen.
“It depends a lot on the flexibility of the work force and attractiveness of business investment,” he said, adding that it will be some time before anyone knows the outcome.
“Ask me in a year and I’ll tell you what’s going on now,” he said.
***
As the clock ticks toward 3 p.m., students run around the College of Technology garage putting tools away and waiting for the professor to dismiss them.
Steigers isn’t one of them.
Sitting on a wooden crate, he stares at a computer terminal in the middle of the shop, navigating the Eaton website, looking for a parts list for the axle that he and his classmate are assigned to disassemble, explain and then reassemble.
Nearby, a few other former Smurfit-Stone employees continue to work while students rush for the long white sink to wash up and head home. Only when the teacher washes up and grabs his bag, do Steigers and the others start to head to the sink.
Stiegers likes the structure the classes have brought to his life and he has developed a strong connection with the other students.
“Like the workers at the mill, I’m (invested) with some of these students that I’m going to school with,” he says. “They’re already my friends.”
And for the first time in months, he’s having more good days than bad.
“There’s something to look forward to… it gives you some kind of hope,” he says.
The hope is for a good-paying job, to work another decade before retiring. But even with those prospects in mind, he still wishes he could go back to what he did for so long.
“I still can’t… I mean, I believe it, but I just don’t understand why I’m here yet, you know? I still feel like I should be out at the mill and the mill should be running,” he says. “I think that this is always going to be a sense of loss, it’s like losing someone in your family.”
It’s with these thoughts that he leaves school, gets in his car and drives out of the city, turning onto County Route 12, near the now-closed mill, on his way home. There are other roads that could take him, but he still drives past the mill – and the hundreds of hard hats still hanging on the fence – every day.
As he crests the hill just north of the mill, a school bus slows to a stop.
Watching the kids cross the road, Steigers eyes take in the gray buildings that once shot smoke and steam skyward, the buildings that were the cornerstone of a community and his life.
“I still don’t believe it,” he says.
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There was an Oregon business summit yesterday, and the word of the day seems to be "death spiral.." Boy, oh howdy, does that scare the pee-wadding off the baby. An economic death spiral. That is what you get when you allowed all your jobs to be exported, and continue to birth children. Generationally non working families, all sucking off those who do work. Lower expectations in education and employment. Out migration of the young to greener fields. The housing bubble was going to happen one way or another. There was going to be a surplus of housing in the New West because we lost our way, and our ability to grow our jobs. We sent the jobs elsewhere to preserve our environment and many other reasons, some now looking very naive and dubious. NIMBY to POVERTY in short steps, short time frames.
Having been through the very same process as the subjects in this news story, I found the story picked at scabs not yet healed after 20 years. In 1991, I spent maybe an hour at the auction as the 4 year old milling equipment was sold for a dime on the dollar invested just 4 years prior in a modernization and rebuild. We employed the same number of people, but produced thirty percent more lumber from essentially the same amount of timber and logs. But having a really good mill means nothing if your access to logs was severed. And public timber had become off limits to save charismatic sub species of birds, mammals, and plants, an endeavor, by the way, that has yet to yield fruit. The species involved have declined further, and the whole of the process was nothing more than a move by timber giant Weyerhaeuser and others to gain market share for their Canadian timber holdings. They got the job done. And, while this story is poignant and brings a tear to my eye, too, the truth is that Montana's senior Senator inserted a tax break worth $178,000,000 for Weyerhaeuser in his Montana Lands Act deal to buy Plum Creek's cutover land when they are done removing the trees. I have no idea how much Baucus got for turning that trick, but tarts usually sell cheap if you tell them they are cute. One does wonder how that money could have helped public schools in Montana that once got a quarter of all the Federal timber receipts generated in the state. Tough to lose your job while your supposed political benefactors deal from the bottom of the deck.
The reporters usually talk about the direct employees of the mill who lost jobs. For every employee at the mill, there was at least one job lost in contracting, trucking, railroad, parts suppyling, and public jobs dependent upon the taxes generated by the mill, its operations, and the income taxes on the people who worked directly and indirectly for the mill who now are working or not, here or elsewhere.
The sawmill I bought timber for had 67 employees. We also had two logging sides working most of the times. Trucks hauled bark, sawdust, pulping chips, and planer shavings every day, and lumber. Every load of logs produced a corresponding load of material hauled away. Or else the mill would soon be under a pile of its own waste. A paper mill works the same way. But you add chemicals and water as well. And every ancillary job supports jobs in the supply and services industry, all jobs no longer there. The death spiral. The devolution of an economy. Think about it. And think about how we might stop this death spiral. It is a very real and present danger. We have to make stuff to survive. Painting nails and marking prices on imported goods at the discount store are not jobs that slow or stop the death spiral. Nor are jobs dependent upon taxation for paying salaries sustainable. We have to mine, log, harness, create, manufacture, fabricate, develop, ranch, farm, make stuff. And sell it here and offshore. Affordable, quality goods, made from raw material we produce using energy we produce and packaged in material we produce, to be shipped in trucks we produce to markets where we can compete. This deal of our economy being a math exercise in which you pick off a tenth of one percent on a volume of trillions of dollars of investments or currencies serves Wall Street, but none else. We need real bricks, mortar, dirty hands, technology driven, raw material using jobs. And that means that our world will be less pristine, but way better off than the class warfare, revolution, and the hateful speech we get more and more accustomed to. Americans are capable of so much more. We have to tear down the barriers to economic growth that we have allowed to be installed, and go forward.
vultures like goldman sachs fatten themselves on our economic death.
Our manufacturing sector has been completely gutted and shipped to China over the past 30 years. Where are all the jobs going to come from now? The government? At least when the Great Depression hit, we had our manufacturing intact. Where are all the so-called 'green jobs' to fill the void? And who, on an average income can afford the products coming out of that sector?
As I finish it and read the comments, though, I'm thinking about how we Americans are still clinging desperately to a dream that some "big corporation" will come to town and give us a job. Dreaming that a wealthy corporate knight will ride in and find molybdenum or gold in them thar hills, and then hire us to go up and dig it up for them. Then, we can suffer injustices at our jobs, lose a finger here, a man there, and then we will create a noble union, that will eventually become a racket, and price us all out of the labor market. Or, our pols will make a deal with Canadian softwood producers who are 50% gov't owned to flood us with softwoods under a "trade agreement," etc. etc. Mexicans headed north to work for less, from places where you work for almost nothing...Chinese fatcats building it cheaper with their billions of Commie slaves, and dumping all their effluents in the river for somebody else to worry about.
Can we get over the idea that corporations and companies can be the "bread and butter" of our communities, when we know full well that these entities will cut and run as soon as the gettin is better over yonder? I almost laughed out loud when I read about the mighty table built in the Champion International days. recall a little history of that savior?
No knights coming. No corporate saviors. America started out as root hog or die. That is what it is now. No Commie overlord giving you a job as pig- man- for- life on the communal farm. No Champion promising lifelong employment if you'll just let them cut out every watershed for a hundred miles. No Marcus Daly blowing up Butte and fouling the clark Fk for a 500 years and throwing you a few bucks off the verandah if you don't misbehave.
Make it yourself. Think it up an do it. If the government won't do the bidding of the people in their race with corporate greed, a good root hog or die mentality will be the best prep work for revolt. Lifelong company men don't revolt. Free people do. Being free is hard.
Reading some of this story and comments reminded me of that Kurt Vonnegut novel Slapstick, where everybody aspired to be the slaves of Vera Chipmunk 5 Zappa.
The world changes. You won't woo the bread and butter companies back by kowtowing and promising them that you'll let them wreck the place if they'll just bring back the holy jobs. Good riddance. Get to work.
Woods products milling operations have a life of about 20 years which can be stretched to sometimes 40. But they all become obsolete in time. Just as they open, they close. Many mills were built to service a known quantity of timber over a known period of time. The life of the operation was known from day one. However, many went on long after the private timber supply they owned was depleted, using public timber bought at auction. That was the reason for the end of the industry as Montana knew it. The USFS quit selling timber for all kinds of reasons, none of which was predicated on the economic health of the area. The mills and the private lands have yet to have sufficient time to renew the resource. Thus the Montana Lands Bill and Baucus financing the REITs of PCT and Weyco, at about a billion dollars expenditure of taxpayer money from Federal coffers.
There is a scale of operation that has to be recognized in the different kinds of milling operations. Dimension sawmills, cutting mills, stud mills, veneer mills, plywood lay up plants, board plants using residuals. To afford the machinery and operational costs, a certain number of logs and produced product has to come from the plants. The scale of operation is what determines how long a mill stays around, and is totally dependent on log supply. And from that log supply will come lumber, or some finished product, and residuals of the process like bark, sawdust, wood chips, and energy. To run the Stone Container linerboard plant took a finite amount of residual every day. And every time another sawmill, plywood operation, closed, that supply diminished. And today, there is really not the raw material available to run a plant like that at the scale it needs to run to enjoy the fruits of created synergies that come with larger, rather than smaller, size.
So to create and finance a deal like that, it takes more than a few piggy banks worth of nickels. Big deal and big risk, which means there is no bank in Montana that has the horsepower to finance a paper mill. So capital will have to come from elsewhere, and elsewhere is now anywhere in the world. Do not be surprised, that if the mill is resurrected, it is with foreign ownership. We buy their stuff, and they buy our Treasury notes. They now have the money, and we have the colonial raw materials, ever cheapening labor, and sufficient law and order to protect the capital from warlords and oligarchs. Of so we think.
Things can evolve, and things can do what we now see, and that is devolve. Unwind. Death spiral. All while the raw material is argued over as to who will get to what in it, with it, or not. A lot of Wilderness, bicycle use, grazing use, whatever, issues will become moot as the government finds itself without the means to even protect what is there now. The "let is burn because fire is natural" is part of the big coverup. Propaganda to lead the populace to believe that burning forests will protect them. I remember required reading in college along that line, which was the stuff of literature...
You will know the mill's fate by keeping an eye on the public notice process which will have to note a permit to demolish. And, when you see the large cranes and the out of state trucks, read the names and google them, to see if they are mill "recovery" companies. I was told by a guy I know, in September, that when his outfit was done taking out a pulp mill in Tacoma, they were headed for Missoula to take down a pulp mill. International Paper, who bought all of Weyerhaeuser's pulp and paper operations, immediately closed 5 mills, and announced they would be scrapped. Over capacity in the industry. Or underuse of produced products?? Parsing words. Scrap metal is worth as much as it ever has. Stainless is valuable. And so are all the other metals high on nobility scale. And the wiring and electrical components, all are high value to scrappers. And that money comes in now, as opposed to waiting for the next idiot to come down the road.
The end to that mill was well orchestrated, long ago, by the NGOs of the environment. That was their stated goal. It has come to pass. The issue was and always has been, that public timber competed with private timber, and that thorn wore holes in MegaPulp hides. They put their resources to where they would end that process, and did. The NGOs cannot exist on payroll check offs and donations cards alone. They need the big tax avoidance money of wealth transfer, the Trusts and Foundations, to send them big hunks of money and they have. Those Billionaires who keep getting tax breaks use those tax breaks to accumulate vast wealth that they are now passing to the next generation by avoiding taxes by setting up Trusts and Foundations. That the votes of every share of stock held by the Trusts and Foundations is voted heirs appointed to oversee the Trusts and Foundations, for generous salaries and benefits, should not be lost on those who believe they have a safe and secure job. The same people run the companies, although they no longer own a majority of the stock. And, to have the tax avoidance, a percentage of the gains and the principle each year has to be disposed of. So why not give it to some NGO that will end public timber cutting, a threat to your family interests???
Just think about all those Pew committees and funds. Those are from the ownership of Sun Oil, Sunoco. All those old time spin offs from Standard Oil, and the "trust busting" of the TR era have reformed into the same companies once again. So how did International Paper acquire Weyerhaeuser's pulp and paper operations and not be in violation of anti trust laws?? Our country no longer enforces anti trust laws. And so our jobs were sold to China and India, et al...
The whole of the New West economy is a travesty. That the travesty is operated out of state, far away on the East Coast, is just more hurtful than you can think. We have no control of our destiny if only because of a Federal Estate that is so large and overwhelming. We no longer can get there from here, and not even a USFS conditional use permit is in the offing. sigh.....
I'm talking specifically about the rush into biomass (wood chips and slash) energy production. The subsidies are all lined up, bond interest guarantees in place, and Congress is defanging EPA's clean air division, and deregulating the supply chain. What more could an Asian investment broker want? The pitchmen are busy selling biomass production. Wouldn't be the first big investment in Montana fools' gold. Fiberoptics anyone?