BUCKSPORT, Maine — Millworkers who expected to be laid off as soon as Dec. 1 will get a monthlong reprieve, as Verso Mill officials announced this week they will not let workers go until the end of the month.
Bill Cohen, spokesman for Verso, said Wednesday that the company will stop making paper in Bucksport on Thursday, Dec. 4. But workers will stay on the employment rolls until Dec. 31 in order to clean up, winterize and “mothball the machines,” he said.
“We said in the beginning, 60 days ago, that until we had all our plans in place, we weren’t sure of our exact schedule,” Cohen said.
At the beginning of October, the company made the surprise announcement that it would cease papermaking operations in Bucksport in December, putting around 500 employees out of work. Verso has said all along that it will continue to operate the power plant at the mill site, but officials initially did not say how many workers would be needed to keep that going.
This week, Cohen said that Verso estimates 50 to 60 people will be needed to run the power island.
“But we’re not sure yet,” he said.
The delay in laying off the workers will be a help to workers trying to figure out how to pay for Christmas gifts and heating oil, according to Roger Doyon of Winterport, the vice president of Local 261 and a longtime papermaker at the mill. But the shifting timeline and changing information also has posed challenges for workers.
“It keeps changing, almost on a daily basis,” he said. “They’re trying to say that the [layoff delay] is a gesture of good faith to the hard workers of Bucksport. That, I don’t buy. They’ve never had a gesture of good faith for all the years we’ve worked there and put our heart and soul into the business.”
Many of the workers who will be laid off by Verso were making paper in Bucksport long before the company owned the mill. Champion sold the mill to International Paper in 2000, and Verso was spun off from International Paper in 2006.
Although the ownership has changed, the quality of the paper and the workers hasn’t, Doyon said.
“I’ll put my coworkers against any other mill in the country or the world. The quality of our work is second to none, and the Verso people know that,” he said.
Doyon said that on Monday, union representatives and company officials came to an agreement regarding severance packages. If a worker finds permanent employment somewhere else that starts before they are laid off by Verso, they will still receive their severance packages, Doyon said, calling the agreement “critical.”
Still, it is a hard time to be at the mill, with workers worried about finances and the future.
“I’ve been trying to keep people staying focused, to not let this distract them,” Doyon said. “What I would hate to see worse than anything else is somebody getting hurt because of this.”