BAILEYVILLE – Georgia-Pacific Corp. said Tuesday it will resume production at its oriented strand board plant on Friday.
Production at the plant was suspended Dec. 15 when the company cited poor market conditions. The layoff idled more than 80 workers.
In a statement Tuesday, Gaile Nicholson, G-P’s communication manager, said 31 of the OSB plant employees, including some former chip-n-saw plant employees, have already returned to work to prepare the equipment for full operation.
She said the remaining 56 OSB workers returned Monday to receive equipment annual training before the production startup later this week.
Last year, company officials suspended production for an indefinite period. The announcement came less than two months after G-P extended the summer shutdown of its chip-n-saw plant until spring 2001.
At the time, G-P said the company was forced to continue the chip-n-saw layoff because of high manufacturing costs and low product demand. Nicholson said Tuesday that production at the chip-n-saw mill had been suspended indefinitely.
Although the company blamed the shutdown at the OSB plant and chip-n-saw mill on poor market conditions, workers last year blamed the layoffs on cheap Canadian imports.
Similar market conditions led to months of shutdowns at both the chip-n-saw and OSB plants in 1998. But 1999 was a record market year for the OSB plant, and there were no layoffs.
Oriented strand board is an engineered wood product made from a combination of small flakes bonded together for strength and used in the building trades industry. The chip-n-saw mill produces dimensional lumber, including two-by-fours, for the house-building market.
G-P built the OSB mill in 1980. In 1994, the world’s largest flaker was installed at the mill. OSB employees each year produce 214,500,000 square feet of oriented strand board, sturd-I-floor and OSB webstock for I-beams.
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