The usual small town cry story.
The pulp and paper mill in my home town closed. No surprise, you could have seen it coming from a decade ago. Still 340 jobs (not to mention jobs that relied on that industry such as logging companies, etc) like that gone in a community of 16,000 is a big blow.
It is frustrating though. My main gripe is with the union and the employees. The company was upfront and said "look you have to be so productive in order to stay open, you currently arent hitting production quotas so either step up or be prepared" and the workers pretty much said "they're bluffing", guess what they weren't. The workers also striked for higher wages when they were already getting above industry pay.
Then the township which owns its own electrity company of which the mill is the biggest customer refused to give a deal to the mill on the price of power to help keep it cost effective.
There other factors such as an overabundance of news print lowering its price, the conservative provincial govt ended subsidies to building of new logging roads, etc.
So the last six months have been a mad dash to save it but the union seemed unwilling to budge in anyway. So today the mill closed. Worse the Union (in a small petty gesture) has stopped the Corporation that owns the mill from selling its logging rights which cover vast tracts of crown land to other lumber operations in the area. Since the crown land is in the possession of the company for 20 years per contract that means abig bloody nose to all the logging companies in the area that could easily have logged it and hauled it to any number of mills in the surrounding 300 kms.
Now you have to listen to all these untrained, unskilled mill workers that had mint jobs that paid extremely well that came with amazing benefits complain about getting fired for Christmas. Boo fu[b][/b]cking hoo.
Edited, Fri Dec 16 15:27:09 2005 by bodhisattva