BUCKSPORT – Talks broke down Wednesday between union and mill officials over pending job cuts at the International Paper Co. mill.

Two days of talks ended Wednesday with the union leaders rejecting the company’s latest offer for a severance package for employees whose positions will be eliminated. IP officials have said they will cut 80 positions from the mill’s workforce by the end of the year as part of an effort to reduce operating costs at the mill.

“All five locals refused the latest offer,” Jeffrey Snowman, president of Local 1188 of the Paper Allied Industrial Chemical and Energy Workers International, said Thursday. “It was not acceptable to us.”

The company has been inflexible in recent discussions with the unions, according to David Lowell, a business representative with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers.

“The unions are not trying to be a road block to savings for the mill in Bucksport. We’re very interested in maintaining the long-term security and profitability of that mill,” Lowell said. “If that means there have to be some head count reductions, we’re not saying it can’t happen. But the company has been very one-sided in this. They haven’t been interested in working together with us.”

Snowman claimed that company officials had reduced its severance offer during Wednesday’s talks. Mill officials have said that they hope to achieve the desired number of job cuts through voluntary severances and early retirement. They reportedly had offered a package that would include 3 percent of an hourly employee’s annual wage times the number of years he or she had worked for the company.

“They started shrinking their offer from 3 percent to 2.75 and to 2.5,” Snowman said. “We stopped while there was still something left to offer.”

Kelly McFarlane, the mill’s communications manager, would not confirm the figures in the severance package and declined to discuss other aspects of the talks.

“We’re not going to talk about that in the media,” McFarlane said. “We want to work with our unions and their representatives.”

The sticking point in the discussions, according to union leaders, is the issue of wage adjustments for substantial changes to job descriptions at the mill. The elimination of the jobs at the mill will inevitably result in additional work for the workers remaining at the mill, they said.

“The work doesn’t go away,” Snowman said.

Under the existing union contracts, when there are substantial changes to any position at the mill, he said, the unions can apply to have the hourly wages adjusted to compensate an employee for the additional work.

“We have the right to apply for wage adjustments,” he said. “They wanted us to give it up.”

The unions were willing to give up that right, Lowell said, if the company would award the workers remaining at the mill a one-time, lump-sum bonus to compensate them for the additional work load they will face. The company wasn’t interested in that offer, he said.

“They wanted to lower the severance amount that was on the table to account for the money for a bonus to the people left behind,” Lowell said.

McFarlane declined to comment on any details of the discussions that have taken place. The proposed job cuts are part of the company’s effort to reduce operating costs at the mill, she said.

A report published in a weekly newspaper that the job cuts would be spread evenly throughout the different departments at the mill was incorrect.

“That’s not the case,” she said, noting that the elimination of specific positions were something that needed to be worked out with the unions.

Both sides, however, said there were no additional meetings scheduled at this time.

“There’s no scheduled time to sit down and talk again,” McFarlane said. “I won’t speculate on when they will be scheduled.”

The company announced in August that it planned to eliminate at least 100 positions from the mill. Last week, company officials said that 80 jobs will be cut by the end of this year. McFarlane said there is no schedule when the cuts will begin, but said all the jobs will be gone by Dec. 31.