Irving alters logging practices Firm seeking more efficiency

BREWER – Northern Maine loggers and truckers fought hard for two years to get legislation that gave them bargaining rights when they worked for Irving Woodlands LLC in the so-called Fort Kent zone.

While it wasn’t for naught, Irving quickly found a way around the legislation which calls for three contractors to get together to seek rate arbitration.

After mud season this spring, very little logging was done in Irving’s Fort Kent Zone, and when it started there were only two contractors working on Irving land. Loggers who wanted to work had to work for the “two supercontractors,” not for Irving.

“We decided it was time to change the way we did logging in northern Maine,” Anthony Hourihan, northeast manager for Irving Woodlands, said at a meeting of the Forest Resources Association Thursday night. “We partnered with two contractors, the better ones among those we had last year.”

The company also purchased equipment of their own, recruited operators to man the equipment two shifts a day, and bought a fleet of 10 off-road trucks that eliminated the need for smaller trucks on their land. They also use rail cars for long-distance hauls.

Hourihan said “some of the guys who drove the bill” are no longer working for us. He admitted that part of the problem in northern Maine was the company’s fault for “not dealing with problems.”

“When we didn’t deal, they had a strike, and it quickly became political,” he said. “We decided it was a time to make changes.”

Hourihan said changes had to be made to remain cost-effective in the industry in which Irving is but a small company, globally. Some of the major players in the industry are now offshore in South America, Indonesia, Europe and Asia.

The new law and the three-week strike by northern Maine loggers last January showed the company the way of doing business had to change.

The law applies only to Irving’s 826,000 acres in the Fort Kent Zone. That is 6 percent of Maine’s forests.

“We were being told how to do business,” Hourihan said of Maine’s politically charged atmosphere in the northern Maine woods. “Independent contractors decide if they want to work for us, and we set rates.”

“We know we can’t survive doing business the way we were told to do it,” he said. “Mr. Irving called it [the legislation] a hell of a mess in Maine.”

“We want, we need, to be more efficient,” he said.

He said the changes in the Fort Kent Zone were to make that market sustainable, and that’s the way business has to be done. If the legislation were to go away, the company “may change” the way they do business there. The situation in the northern Maine woods was termed “chaos.”

He said the installation of “black boxes” in logging equipment after the strike showed that machinery was not as efficient as it could be. Efficiency was said to be a way to make the industry more cost-effective. The “black boxes allow the company to see what is actually going on in the machine, working hours versus down time.

“Employees need to know that they may be going in the right direction, but if they are not fast enough, they will be run over,” he said. “It’s not a matter of working harder, it’s working smarter, and it drives improvement.”

Using a PowerPoint presentation, Hourihan showed an efficiency rating of 38 percent for a wood harvesting machine. He said paper machines operating at 38 percent are in trouble.

He said greater efficiency will bring more money to landowners by cutting logging rates, and more money for logging contractors, who will cut more wood with the same machinery.

The company is also starting a training program for workers in northern Maine on modern logging equipment. They will train 12 people in the company-sponsored 12-week program done through the Northern Maine Community College. The program starts in November.

The training program, which costs about $15,000 per operator, is paid by Irving and International Paper Co., which has two of the 12 slots. The students are paid while going to school. They would like a 12-18 month signed contract with the graduates.

He said Irving has nine individuals selected for their 10 slots. To get that, they interviewed 57 people. They hope to train at least 40 new workers each year. The company attempted to have the state involved in the training program, but talks continued too long, and the company went at it on their own, he said.

“If contractors don’t hire the [trained] workers, we will put them [on] our own machinery,” Hourihan told contractors. “For the most part, they will be making a good living.”

“We want to be land managers dealing in forest products,” he said. “We don’t want to harvest wood, but we were pushed into a corner.”