The Paradoxes of Paper Mill Employment

This chapter depicts and unpacks the nature of production and work, the special skill profile that made paper mills distinct if not unique, and how over time owners and workers forged a mutually acceptable paternalism. It describes paternalism as the glue that made Maine's paper mills both successful businesses and durable communities during the paper industry's halcyon years from the late nineteenth century through the 1970s. It also looks at the situation in the S. D. Warren Company to understand the critical role of skill and the paradox of suffering and success that marked the paper workers' lives. The chapter highlights that paper mill work delivered high wages and benefits, and offered remarkable jobs and economic security with few parallels in Maine's generally lower-wage, blue-collar sectors. It reveals how the lives of paper mill workers demonstrate the crucial place of skills, craft pride, and membership in a high-status industrial community.

Madawaska Rebellion

This chapter discusses the workers at Fraser Paper Company that revolted against an English management regime that forced speed-up, retracted employment promises, and belittled both union leaders and shop-floor workers. It details how workers, their families, and community members fought back Fraser Paper, using civil disobedience that spiraled into a violent confrontation with mill leaders and state and local police. It also recounts how Fraser Paper was initially run by founders and their sons, along with a stable cadre of professional executives who joined the paper company beginning in 1932. The chapter refers to John “Pete” Heuer, who was the president and chief executive at Fraser Paper who introduced a harsh management approach and battled the mill's unions. It mentions the workers' militant response against Fraser Paper that was shaped through the norms of workplace contractualism and a remarkable local Francophone culture.

Fear and Loathing on the Low and High Roads

This chapter deals with the national and international competition that was eroding companies' pricing power and market shares by the mid-1980s. It talks about workers in a mature industrial state like Maine who were expected to see their paper industry jobs disappear as production moved overseas and work was automated at home and abroad. It also discusses how the national companies that owned Maine's mills made radical demands on workers and attacked traditional union contracts outright. The chapter cites that Boise Cascade and International Paper Company (IP) provoked strikes by making extreme, untenable demands on workers in their Rumford and Jay, Maine, mills in 1986 and 1987. It probes the union-busting campaigns conducted by Boise Cascade and IP that defined what economists call the low road, which clobbered workers in the quest to quickly raise profits.

Paper Workers’ Folk Political Economy Versus Neoliberalism

This chapter reviews that the class resistance in Maine's paper industry has waned since the 1990s, including the movement culture which shaped and sustained it. It looks at the folk political economy and economic imagination that has resonance for Mainers and is considered a cultural artifact that can be joined in a critique of neoliberal capitalism. It also explores the widespread antipathy to key features of the neoliberal era. The chapter discusses the loss of local ownership and control of enterprises and the replacement of Chandlerian stability with the fierce and ugly rationalization imposed by financial investors. It refers to antipathy that is aimed at neoliberalism's assumption that only unfettered private markets provide good economic outcomes.