Voting in the dark

More than 700 production workers at Great Northern go to the polls today to vote on a package of wage and benefit concessions. All, no doubt, have figured out to the penny precisely what the package will cost them and their families, now and for years to come.

What they cannot have figured out, thanks to shifting numbers and spinning public relations, is whether the concessions are necessary.

Inexcon, the prospective buyer for the Bowater properties, says it must have the concessions, including a freeze on wage increases already negotiated, for the deal to work. That’s after Inexcon, when it first entered the picture in May, said it only needed to tinker a bit with benefits. Early this month, with the fervor for an employee-led buyout of Bowater apparently cooled by those comforting words, a 10-percent wage cut was absolutely necessary, plus all the other givebacks. Now, with interest in the employee buyout understandably revived, it’s back to a wage freeze. And throughout, Inexcon has said it will honor existing contracts. Whatever that means.

Yes, negotiating is part of the tug-of-war between labor and management. But this has hardly been a fair fight. In the hard-nosed business world, buyer and seller in these huge transactions usually are adversaries. In this case, Bowater and Inexcon have behaved more like partners. At the height of the outrage over the proposed wage cut, Bowater chimed in with the warning that it would close the aging Millinocket mill, perhaps the newer one in East Millinocket as well, if workers didn’t cave in to its supposed adversary.

To its shareholders, Bowater boasts of industry-leading return on investment. To its Maine workers, it pleads poverty. With the Inexcon deal and an earlier deal on forest lands, Bowater will have sold for more than $600 million properties it paid $322 million for just seven years ago. Yet a Wall Street analyst says Bowater took a pounding in Maine.

The obligations and risks of shareholders — such as capital improvements and fluctuating markets — have been shifted to workers and no one has explained why. Workers at the two mills have been put at each other’s throats. Town officials and neighbors suggest that workers who want the existing contracts honored are being selfish. Political leaders, fond though they are of praising the productivity and work ethic of Maine workers, have been strangely silent.

How the numbers add up, whether they add up at all, remains a mystery to the workers, the people with the most at stake. All they can really be certain of as they enter the voting booth today is that they’re on their own. A decision that should be made with a level, fact-filled head will instead have to be made with the gut.