Weyerhaeuser cutbacks hit already depressed timber towns

ABERDEEN — Calvin O'Brien followed his father and grandfather to work at the sawmill here, the third generation of O'Briens to trade honest labor for a wage that few other jobs could provide in this blue-collar town.

But on Friday, O'Brien found out that Weyerhaeuser planned to close his workplace by the end of the year. By late afternoon, he sat in the NW Passage bar near the mill's front gate, chatting with about a dozen co-workers and grabbing cold beers from a bucket of ice on the table.

"We lived a good life, we always did," the 28-year-old O'Brien said. "It made a good life for me. I was hoping to make a good life for my family, but there it is."

Weyerhaeuser's announcement that it would close the 81-year-old sawmill here and a 50-year-old pulp mill in neighboring Cosmopolis hit hard all across Grays Harbor County, an area of Washington that has survived difficult years of decline in the timber industry.

The Federal Way-based company cited high operating costs and aging machinery, among other problems. Weyerhaeuser said the closures were part of broader plans to fine-tune its operations.

Weyerhaeuser said the closures would cut 342 hourly and salaried positions.

Some 245 of those jobs — with an average annual wage approaching $50,000 — would be lost in Cosmopolis, sapping about 40 percent of the tiny town's tax base, said Mayor Vickie Raines.

The remaining 97 jobs will be cut from a large-log sawmill in Aberdeen, while a mill that processes smaller logs remains open.

Rumors that Weyerhaeuser might close were nothing new, but the announcement still came as a shock, Aberdeen Mayor Dorothy Voege said.

"When it comes, we go through disbelief and panic, which I think are logical responses," she said.

For workers like Lucas Bunch, who sat next to O'Brien in the tavern on Friday, the mill's closure was the end of a job that was once something to be proud of, even brag about.

"Where else can an uneducated 22-year-old walk in and make $18 an hour?" Bunch asked.

The announcement also became an insult for some workers when they got the word from friends, acquaintances and news reports.

Bunch said he first heard the mill was closing when a nurse told his pregnant wife the news during a checkup.

"This paycheck was the best thing I had going for me," Bunch said. "I've missed first birthdays, I've missed funerals — I've missed everything for this place."

Weyerhaeuser spokesman Frank Mendizabal said the way some workers found out was an "unfortunate" coincidence of federal securities requirements that the company file its closure plans before financial markets opened on the East Coast.

"Nobody likes it. I wish we didn't have to do it that way," he said.

The Aberdeen large-log mill is expected to close at the end of 2005, and the Cosmopolis mill is expected to operate into the second half of 2006, Mendizabal said.

The Weyerhaeuser closures mark yet another hardship for Grays Harbor County, which has been suffering since 1980 from timber-industry woes, regional economist Dick Conway said.

Metropolitan areas elsewhere in the state have benefited from the growing technology industry, but rural, blue-collar Grays Harbor County has been too far away from cities to share in those fortunes, Conway said.

Sierra Pacific Industries, a privately held company out of Redding, Calif., did open a new sawmill in Aberdeen in November 2002. It employs about 230 people, producing dimensional lumber for housing and commercial construction — one of the few bright spots for a county that has not been booming for decades.

The loss of 342 jobs is sizable in a county that has just 24,900 jobs, according to Conway's estimates.

Gov. Christine Gregoire said she would dispatch Department of Employment Security representatives to help identify training and benefits available to workers.

At the Maxi Mini Mart in Cosmopolis, owners Kirk and Mark Maynard sat with employee Cris Steuermann at their small indoor picnic tables, reading a newspaper story about the impending closures and discussing the looming effect on the town's economy.

On a typical day at the store, Weyerhaeuser workers and others with jobs tied to the forest-products company are constantly stopping in to fuel up, buy a snack and shoot the breeze, Steuermann said.

"It's not just people I see every day, it's people I know," she said. "Everybody around here is tied to that company in some way."

Bunch, O'Brien and other young mill workers said they were especially concerned for employees at the Cosmopolis pulp mill. Many of them have worked for Weyerhaeuser for decades, and they may have fewer options for work than their twentysomething counterparts.

"You're talking about some people's livelihoods," Raines said. "That's the only employer they've ever known, and they're in their 40s, 50s. So it's hard to swallow — it's really sad."