He said there have been no permanent or temporary layoffs this year and that no employees have collected unemployment, as was the case last year. Still, there were more production days in January 2016 than in January 2015, according to Drechsel. People aren’t making as much as they were before.” “It’s a humongous lifestyle change,” Croteau said.
But since mid-January, workers have been scheduled for five eight-hour shifts Tuesday through Saturday, according to Croteau. Workers previously were scheduled for three 12-hour shifts in a row followed by three days off, a schedule that normally gave them a 48-hour workweek. Union officials also continue to meet with the mill on a weekly basis in hopes of finding a schedule that will suit employees’ needs better, Croteau said. Employees are notified on a weekly basis of what the following week’s production schedule will be, Drechsel said. There is currently no long-term schedule at the mill. “Everyone was worried and panicked that the mill was going to shut down (in 2015), that it wasn’t going to restart,” Drechsel said.
In the meantime, he said the current curtailment at Madison Paper is similar to periods of temporary layoffs that occurred in 2015 and left employees out of work for 10 days to two weeks at a time. Department of Commerce has since announced that it also will review whether the Canadian government has given subsidies to two additional paper companies, Catalyst Paper and Irving Pulp and Paper, which also have had to pay tariffs on imports but whose practices were not subject to investigation initially.ĭrechsel said Tuesday he could not comment on whether lesser tariffs for those companies would affect Madison Paper, since it would depend on how those companies wanted to price their products for sale in the U.S. He said the recently approved duties on supercalendered paper being imported from Canada have had little effect so far on Madison Paper, because the devaluation of the Canadian dollar has continued to keep the price of Canadian paper low. 2 shows that 2015 companywide sales were up 3 percent from 2014, although paper sales in Europe and North America were down.Īccording to Drechsel, demand for supercalendered paper dropped 10 percent from 2014 to 2015. The 2015 financial statement for parent company UPM released Feb. from Canada.ĭrechsel has said he was prohibited from commenting on production at the Madison mill in January because of the company’s publicly traded status, which legally prevents officials from making statements before the release of quarterly financial information. Commerce Department, at the request of Madison Paper and Verso Corp., approved the placement of duties on supercalendered paper being imported into the U.S. The production change comes shortly after the U.S. “My membership is very frustrated with this type of schedule along with the loss in pay.” “We’re still working with the company to try and find other schedules that aren’t so frustrating for my membership,” Croteau said. That change has been frustrating for employees, many of whom lost pay and have had to make changes in their personal lives to accommodate the schedule changes, he said. Croteau said Tuesday that since the end of January, the mill has continued to operate on a Tuesday-through-Saturday schedule.
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