I never met my great-grandfather, but every time I drove by the Bucksport mill, I thought of him. His name was Fred Turner. His father was the cook at the Jed Prouty Tavern. My great-grandmother was a vivacious sea captain’s granddaughter — an unlikely choice for Turner to court. But Turner worked hard to prove he could support his young family. He scratched out a 5-acre farm on Orland Road, and he could do a little carpentry.
Then, in 1930, the Maine Seaboard Paper Company opened its newsprint mill — the forerunner of the recently shuttered Verso Paper mill in Bucksport. The mill offered Turner the chance to pull himself and his family into the middle class. He worked one shift at the mill, and then he worked a second shift at his farm, and he caught some sleep in between. My great-grandmother drove a car up to Bangor to shop, and the well-dressed family posed for family portraits with the little girls’ hair in tight curls. When he received a one-time bonus, Turner used it to build a playhouse for the children. He painted their names on it and hung a sign that read: CAMP SUNSET.
I haven’t driven past the Bucksport mill since its closure was announced. I’m dreading it, especially now that it’s reported the mill will be sold for scrap at a fraction of its value. That’s bitter news for the former millworkers, their families, the community and the entire state of Maine. It also carries two implications about economic policy — and industrial policy.
First, these are the times when the safety net should be strong — not undercut on every side. It’s laudable that policymakers are united across the aisle in backing the Verso unions’ demand for severance pay. But as soft-spoken Turner knew, you need to work hard and harvest goodwill during the sunny spells to be ready for storms. While the Verso workers face unemployment this holiday season, it illustrates why politicians shouldn’t interfere in unemployment hearings, putting a thumb on the scale in favor of corporations. As workers weigh whether they can afford to continue their company health coverage, some of them may be sole breadwinners, or have spouses earning far less.
If policymakers in Augusta had accepted federal health care dollars to cover Maine’s working poor, the Verso workers would have one less thing to worry about while they look for a new job. This also is a case study in why jobless people applying for help shouldn’t have to undergo humiliating and costly drug testing, as if they are criminals. Finally, it highlights the shortsighted nature of Gov. Paul LePage’s administration’s decision to forgo providing federally funded nutrition assistance for more than three months to individuals looking for work in areas of high unemployment.
Second, the Verso closure, along with the 2014 mill closures in East Millinocket and Old Town, underscores the failure of federal and state industrial policy. One employee of the Verso mill concluded sadly: “What’s going to happen is what always happens: Workers are gonna lose and corporations are gonna win.”
More than 8,000 manufacturing jobs have disappeared in Maine over the past seven years. Politicians have been trying to pick the winners with a quiver of taxpayer-subsidized incentives, tax breaks and other corporate freebies — but they tend to give away the farm to fly-by-night profiteers. For years, the federal government was slow to respond while mills in low-wage countries flooded markets with millions of tons of coated paper — priced at less than what it cost to make it, in order to undercut U.S. mills. Tax incentives, rather than freeing money for investment and hiring, tend to go straight to the pockets of far-off investors — such as the $15.9 million in Maine taxpayer dollars that went to “Enhanced Capital New Market Development Fund X LLC” and “Stonehenge Community Development.” The much-vaunted “Pine Tree Development Zones” can’t show evidence they created jobs that would not have been created anyway — and the program has cost as much as $46 million in lost corporate taxes that ordinary Mainers must make up in order to fill the budget hole.
It’s a canard that the paper industry is dead. The outlook for the global paper industry ranges from stable to strong. American manufacturing is hamstrung, beset by low-wage competition on one front, and hounded by hedge funds looking to “unlock value” on the other. The Bucksport mill is looking like a casualty of years of bad policy and short-sightedness. It’s incumbent on policymakers to make sure that Turner’s dream that he worked so hard for — that a cook’s son could join the middle class — doesn’t die, too.
Christy Daggett is a policy analyst with the Maine Center for Economic Policy.