BUCKSPORT – Thirty salaried employees received their pink slips Friday as part of a 3.5 percent work force reduction announced last week by International Paper Co.

Employees’ last days on the will be staggered with the first workers leaving at the end of October, according to Kelly McFarlane, spokeswoman for IP’s Bucksport mill.

“People will be leaving throughout this year into the third quarter of 2004,” she said Sunday. “It’s too early to determine how the layoffs will affect the workload of other employees. We will work that out through this transition period.”

The plan to cut IP’s work force by 3,000 over the next year was announced last week. The company employs about 86,500 people worldwide.

Jenny Boardman, an IP spokeswoman based in Stamford, Conn., said last week that the layoffs were part of a broader plan to boost profits by $1.5 billion by 2005. She also said that the company would provide severance packages and help people find new jobs.

McFarlane said Wednesday when the layoffs were announced it was “too soon to speculate how many” managers would be laid off from the Bucksport mill. Salaried employees are a small percentage of the 900 employees at the mill, she said last week.

The cuts announced Friday did not affect hourly workers, according to McFarlane. The spokeswoman said last week that other initiatives are under way to determine the mill’s optimum staffing levels.

Last year, 109 hourly employees were laid off in Bucksport.

Further layoffs at the mill were not mentioned last month when U.S. Rep. Michael Michaud and two state representatives met with mill manager Dennis Castonguay, according to Michaud.

Michaud, a former Great Northern Paper Co. worker, said in August that he could “understand why everyone is on edge” in Bucksport after watching 1,130 GNP workers get laid off late last year. About 400 GNP workers have returned to work.