Finding the Bottom Line

It’s a sad fact that paper mill downsizing announcements have almost become routine in Maine. Last week, Fraser Papers announced it was cutting 190 jobs in Madawaska.

The week before, Georgia-Pacific ceased making tissue products at its mill in Old Town, putting 300 people out of work. The former Great Northern mill in East Millinocket is slated to reopen soon, but the Millinocket mill will likely remain idle for more than a year. When both mills are running, perhaps half as many workers will be employed there as when Great Northern declared bankruptcy in January.

So, Mainers may have been a bit baffled last week when Gov. John Baldacci said the paper industry was not in decline and that it would continue to represent an important role in the state’s economy. He may have been factually accurate, but the public is not looking for technical truths, it wants a sign that the governor realizes how desperate things are in rural Maine. More importantly, it wants ways to improve the situation.

The truth is that Maine mills are continuing to make more paper with fewer workers. That’s good for corporate profits and great for shareholders. It’s not good for employees who are out of work. While many say it is unfair for companies to have more regard for their profitability than the well-being of the communities where they operate, Maine is unlikely to try to legislate corporate generosity. What can and should be done is to aggressively search for alternative industries to replace the one that is slowly leaving.

And while working on those alternatives, it must also work with paper companies to encourage them to upgrade and invest in the infrastructure that is already here, to maintain a smaller jobs presence rather than no presence at all. If the same company that is closing a mill here is pouring millions of dollars into plants in Louisiana, Florida and Oregon, Maine’s economic developers should find out why. Then they should find out what Maine must do to encourage similar investment. Perhaps the usual suspects – high taxes, power and transportation costs – will be to blame. Perhaps not.

This need not be a giveaway to the paper companies – they have their bottom lines to look after and so does Maine. It must make unsentimental decisions based on where the state’s economy is headed. Maine government can steer it only part way there, but the shock of the last several months shows clearly that it must look harder at what can be done to save the jobs that are fast leaving.