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.
It all ended Friday, when O’Brien, 28, found out Weyerhaeuser planned to shutter 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,” 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 Western Washington that has gone through 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 Vickie Raines, the city’s mayor.
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 to the area, 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 such as 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 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 was expected to close at the end of 2005, Mendizabal said. The Cosmopolis mill was expected to operate into the second half of 2006, he said.
The Weyerhaeuser closures mark another hardship for Grays Harbor County, which has suffered since 1980 from timber industry woes, regional economist Dick Conway said.
Metropolitan areas elsewhere in the state have benefited from the growing technology industry and other changes, but rural, blue-collar Grays Harbor County has been too far away from cities to share in those fortunes, Conway said.
“For an economy like Grays Harbor it’s a severe blow,” he said. “That county probably more than any county in the state has suffered from the decline in the timber industry.”
Sierra Pacific Industries, a privately held company out of Redding, Calif., did open a new sawmill in Aberdeen in November 2002.
The mill employs about 230 people, producing dimensional lumber for housing and commercial construction – one of the few bright spots for a county that hasn’t boomed for decades.
The loss of 342 jobs is sizable in a county that has just 24,900 jobs, according to Conway’s estimates. By comparison, software giant Microsoft Corp. employs more than 29,000 people in the state.
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