BATH, Maine — Heading home to Searsport on Monday after his first day at Bath Iron Works, Bucksport paper mill veteran Travis Ashey’s phone was lighting up.
“I got about eight text messages last night asking me how it went,” Ashey said on Tuesday during a break in training at the shipyard.
Ashey, Ted Reed and Paige Pelletier are among the first group of former Verso Paper mill employees in Bucksport to leave for new jobs in advance of the shutdown Wednesday that has displaced more than 500 employees. For them, the three said the new job is a process of starting over.
“We’re newbies,” said Pelletier, who lives on Verona Island and worked at the Bucksport mill for six years.
Reed, who worked 29 years at the mill, said he came to the shipyard looking for a new start.
“We don’t want to get pegged down as being from the mill,” Reed said. “We just want to come out and make a name for ourselves.”
All three will be working as preservation technicians — painting, primarily — and in other capacities across the yard. Specific training for those jobs is weeks away for the new recruits who spent Monday and Tuesday being briefed on shipyard basics such as safety and security — and how to keep track of hours worked.
“These guys take a lot of pride in what they do, and we took a lot of pride in what we did,” Reed said. “And so I want to be part of something like that, you know what I mean?”
The three are among a group of about 10 former Bucksport millworkers the shipyard has hired so far, after holding a recruitment meeting in October at the mill. More may be on the way.
The new jobs come after what Reed said has been a “roller-coaster ride” since Verso announced in October plans to close the mill.
Production continued for more than two months after that, followed by mothballing the facilities that Reed said gave him hope that a buyer would take on papermaking there.
“That’s what we all had in our mind: we’re going to preserve the place, and someone’s going to come in and start it back up,” Reed said. “In the middle of all of that, they announce that they have a buyer. That brought everyone’s hopes back up, and then we find out it’s a scrap dealer.”
Ashey, Pelletier and Reed said those two months were difficult, and they faced each day with uncertainty and speculation about whether they would have any chance of continuing to work at the mill.
“I think a lot of us put that in the back of our mind because it was very unsafe with what they threw on us — trying to keep your mind on your job when you have all that moving equipment, that was pretty stressful,” Reed said.
Other former colleagues, some of whom worked their last day Wednesday, are still evaluating their options, Pelletier said.
“There are a lot of people waiting to see how we like it,” she said.
Reed said he’d made the early jump to BIW because he wanted to “hit the ground running” and was fortunate enough to land the job. Others leaving the mill have been faced with a scramble to find work, especially for those who were until earlier this month holding out hope that a new buyer would restart the mill.
“It may force some of the workers who were trying to buy some time to make those decisions a little earlier, like before the holidays,” said Maine Department of Labor spokeswoman Julie Rabinowitz in an interview after the announcement that Verso would sell its mill to the U.S. subsidiary of Montreal-based metal recycler American Iron & Metal Co.
Employees of the mill qualified for federal job training assistance and some of those more than 50 years old — about 70 percent of the work force, Rabinowitz said — may be eligible for wage subsidies that could help make up for a decline in pay if they pursue a new career.
Those subsidies typically last for about six months but can be extended in some circumstances.
It leaves some difficult choices ahead, and ones that Ashey said will take workers out of the region.
“The reason people have to travel so far for work is that not only did the mill go down, but it affected the support companies in the whole area,” Ashey said.
Ashey’s new commute is about 140 miles round-trip.
Pelletier, whose commute went from a few miles to about 160 miles round-trip, said she plans to move for the new job. Reed’s daily commute stretched about 80 miles longer both ways, but he made out the best of the group, so far.
“I first started looking at how far I would have to travel for a quality job that’s something that I’m used to doing,” Reed said. “I was going to have to travel — there’s just no way around that.”