Missoula News

paperboard blues

Workers Hope to Rescue Missoula’s Paper Mill

By Robert Struckman, 8-02-08

Union activist Roy Houseman. Photo by Alexia Beckerling

An enterprising young millworker and his union cohorts have a plan to save Missoula’s Smurfit-Stone paperboard mill.

The millworker is 27-year-old Roy Houseman.

Educated with a bachelor’s in English literature from the University of Montana, Houseman says, he started at the mill because it offered great pay and a way to stay in his home state. Since his start, he has learned that rumors of closure always plague the mill, hanging around the place like a dire smog. He’s aware of the company’s most recent economic troubles and the problems specific to the Missoula mill.

There has been no announcement of any plans to close the mill.

“It’s a serious concern,” Houseman said. “But I’m going to do my damnedest to make sure it doesn’t happen.”

Those problems? First, the plant has no long-term contracts for utilities. With higher-than-ever energy prices, the mill is getting hammered.

Second, top executives at Smurfit-Stone say the company is too large with both too many employees and too many plants. The company lost $10 million a month for the last three months, and on Tuesday executives announced aggressive plans to shutter 11 of its 175 plants over the next six to 12 months.

Finally, the Missoula plant’s cost for raw fiber - basically wood chips - is terribly high.

That’s where Houseman and others hope to make a difference. After all, 430 local jobs with an average pay of about $25 per hour are on the line, he said.

“As much as the decision will be a top-down number-crunching, there’s also the bottom pushing up,” he said.

The effort, which Houseman said he only recently joined, will be to make a 10-year management plan for the Beaverhead and Deer Lodge national forests to address environmental concerns while also allowing the cutting of some timber, some of which could be used as cheaper pulp at the Smurfit-Stone mill.

“If we can cut the cost per ton, we can make it work,” he said. “The important thing is we want to keep it from being inevitable, for this to be a moment of change and an example to other manufacturing sectors: ‘If you put the effort in, you may be able to save your mill, too.’”

As a reprise: The only person - officially and publicly - predicting its closure is me, relying on some off-the-record interviews and my own admittedly rough analysis. In fact, in one key point, I was wrong: The new uber-mill brought online in Chicago and its counterpart in the works in Los Angeles don’t make the same thing the Missoula plant does, so they’re not providing competition to replace Missoula’s output.

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