“Today’s announcement is part of the ongoing effort to strengthen Weyerhaeuser’s overall portfolio to enhance shareholder value,” said Steven R. Rogel, chairman, president and chief executive officer, Weyerhaeuser Co.
I have some experience with job loss. I've lost seven of them.
I remember the night I heard for the first time that I had lost my job. It was late 1979 in Portland and I was called in from the unloading dock at Garrett Freightlines to sit with the friends who had helped me get hired 2 months earlier. I was 32, making $10 an hour, married and with 4 children in our home. My wife was not working and the six of us were totally dependent on my job.
Garrett had just suffered through a ten-day-long decline in shipping orders and had decided to lay off 200 workers system wide based on seniority (and that meant I was 2nd from the bottom of the seniority list). I don't remember how many in Portland were laid off that night, but at least 2 of my friends who'd been working there for several years got their notices also. They were never called back to work.
Having moved to Portland 7 months earlier and aware that I would get unemployment, it would not be enough to pay the bills. Trying to suppress any sense of panic, I told myself that I lived in a city economy where things were busy and bustling - and was grateful not to be stuck in the rural area in Idaho where I grew up - an area that had been in economic decline for decades.
I promptly sat down and typed up the classiest resume I could create and mailed 300 to every employer advertising in the help-wanted section of the Oregonian and to every employer in the yellow pages with a business I felt could use someone of my experience.
I stopped at 300 because I could not part with any more unemployment income for postage purposes.
I worked at job-networking, made cold calls in person and out of the yellow pages and considered self employment. I tried selling on a straight commission basis, looked for part time jobs I could bundle into adequate monthly income, considered joining the Reserve for a monthly weekend paycheck, and took several civil service exams.
Still no adequate employment.
After 3 months, nearly crazy in a personal financial panic, resigned to losing my mortgage, and having lost my car to repossession, I received two offers the first week in January, 1980.
The first offer was from Standard Insurance Company as a contract draft specialist. They offered $12k per year to start. The second was from a local trucking company offering me 17k as a dispatcher. Needing money more than job security I became a dispatcher. I would come to regret making that choice.
I was to enter the world of cut-throat small time trucking and suffer through 6 companies laying me off or going out of business in the next seven years (I spent enough time there to create my own network for replacing lost jobs - always afraid to go back into that terrifying nightmare of 1979).
My nightmare eventually ended and today I am theoretically within 7 years of retirement with the Washington State DSHS. When the opportunity to move back to rural living came up, I took it and moved to Pacific County where I administer the federal TANF program under its state-designed WorkFirst program. I see first hand what it means to do job-searching in a rural area that has been in economic decline for decades.
Job-seeking in North Pacific County amounts to a potential of contacting every employer within 30 miles.
That might take three weeks.
In the fourth week, you start over again.
Market conditions forcing companies like Weyerhaeuser to close plants and let people go is an unfortunate circumstance that emphasizes above all else two significant priorities: the bottom line and its relationship to stockholders.
"Nobody likes it. I wish we didn't have to do it that way," a Weyco official declared.
"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]
Apparently Weyerhaeuser reported - the same day it announced the Grays Harbor closures - third-quarter net earnings of $285 million on net sales of $5.6 billion. The third-quarter 2004 numbers were $594 million and $5.7 billion, respectively.
I could find no information at this point and probably need to be enlightened as to whether or not Weyco's quarterly report means they operated in the black or the red. But if they are still in the black with only quarterly earnings of $285 million, does that not suggest that "returning cash to the shareholders" and the standard of "shareholder value" has some arbitrarily fixed standard of profit measurement under which Weyco management dares not go out of fear of stockholder dissatisfaction?
Weyerhaeuser cannot be singled out as an exception to an overall pattern of corporate social consciousness, sensitivity and awareness - because there is no strong overall pattern of corporate social consciousness, sensitivity and awareness in this country. Furthermore, to my knowledge, Weyco should not be compared to corporations like Walmart in terms of how employees have been respected and valued nor in any way to economic harm done to small towns by bottom-line Walmarts.
Perhaps the bottom line IS the bottom line. Perhaps a way of integrating social consciousness into the monetary agreement between stockholders, the corporations, the employees and the communities where business is done needs to be found.
Perhaps what needs to be integrated is an understanding that stockholding with an eye single to the bottom line has not proven to be the best and most uniform means of spreading prosperity across a broader range of society. We live in a time when talking heads (primarily Republican) bray about the economy "growing" but have no answer or justification for why the middle class is shrinking - and why a shrinking middle class is a good thing overall for an economy or society.
WashBlog is going to spend some time exploring the Weyerhaeuser closings, their impact on the community and the response from state government.