Paycheck poker

Great Northern workers must make deep wage and benefit concessions or the sale of Bowater’s Maine holdings to Inexcon will fall through, Bowater says. The Millinocket mill will be closed, its East Millinocket sister will be in jeopardy.

Bowater officials say that sobering message was delivered this week as a warning, to convey the urgency of the situation. The company can no longer support the aging Millinocket plant. The numbers don’t add up for Inexcon. Fifteen hundred scaled-down jobs are better than no jobs at all.

Workers say that sobering message was nothing less than a threat. Bowater is sweetening an already sweet deal by playing Inexcon’s bad boy. This isn’t about the bottom line in Millinocket; it’s about setting a precedent for wage and benefit concessions throughout the industry.

It may be one, it may be the other. Ultimately, it may be a bad bet by Bowater, an unwise gamble by Inexcon. The alternative to this deal — an employee-led purchase — appears to be alive and increasingly well.

Supporters of the employee stock buyout, including representatives from Wall Street, will meet with workers in the two mill towns this week. Given their estimate that the concessions will reduce the average paycheck by a shocking $150 per week, they have good reason to expect the rift between the struggling Millinocket mill and the more modern East Millinocket mill will close.

Equally shocking is what appears to be a lack of candor by both Bowater and Inexcon. This spring, when Inexcon first entered the picture, President Lambert Bedard talked only about the need to reassess the benefits package, an understandable and universal problem given the soaring costs of health insurance.

At the same time, Bowater CEO Arnold Nemirow was telling investors at the annual shareholders’ meeting that the new Inexcon offer was attractive enough to be taken seriously, as was the employee buyout. With investors in a good mood — Bowater has led the forest-products industry five years running in return on shareholder investment — they probably could have handled the news that the Inexcon offer was attractive only if workers got gouged in the process.

Also at the same time, the Legislature was in session and wisely passed a bill enhancing the state’s ability to assist in employee buyouts. Had Bowater and Inexcon been forthright then about what they now claim are irrefutable facts, lawmakers, with a bulging surplus at their disposal and a fondness for assisting business, no doubt would have lent a hand. Now that the Legislature has adjourned, the only way to fill the gap between what Inexcon will pay and what Bowater will accept is with employee concessions.

The tragedy here is that two Maine communities are being held hostage and the Great Northern workers are being portrayed as the kidnappers. They did not make the management decisions that allowed the Millinocket mill to fall into disrepair. They did not cause the Asian economic crisis that depressed the market. They certainly did not rewrite the rules of capitalism to shift the risks of the marketplace, and the repercussions of short-sighted management decisions, from investors to employees.

All they did was to show up on time and make paper. And that seems to be where the Great Northern workers made their mistake. All these years they’ve been jobholders; they should have been shareholders.