04/19/2006

Editorial

G-P's failure to warn workers is its legacy

So much for community loyalty and corporate citizenship.

Gaylord-area residents got a refresher course in modern corporate ethics last month when employees of the Georgia-Pacific particle board plant showed up for work one Monday morning and found the doors locked and their jobs gone for good.

The ripple effect of the sudden closure came almost immediately. In addition to the 210 G-P employees who were out of work, firms that had done business with Georgia-Pacific for years laid off another 150 workers.

Two logging firms with long-term contracts with the company said G-P ignored provisions that called for up to 90 days' notice of closing; they sued.

The federal government has said the firm must give workers 60 days of so-called "warning" pay for failing to give notice of the closure.

Local officials estimate the region lost $12 million in annual payroll, $8 million of that in Otsego County alone. The plant represented about 13 percent of the county's total manufacturing payroll.

It was a devastating blow to Gaylord's economy made worse — much worse in some individual cases — by the lack of notice. Georgia-Pacific dropped a bomb and left the community to deal with the fallout.

It has to be said that no one can reasonably expect any company — even one as large as Georgia-Pacific — to continue to operate a plant that isn't making money or doesn't fit into future plans. That's unfair and unrealistic. The company exists to make money, and that's what its investors expect and deserve.

A community does, however, have every right to expect it will be treated with some modicum of dignity and respect when the end comes. It's hard — make that impossible — to believe that Georgia-Pacific didn't know for weeks and months that the end was coming.

Not sharing that information with supposedly valued employees was a gross disservice. Telling workers months or even weeks earlier that the firm was reviewing the plant's future would have given them time to prepare or at least get used to the idea.

A former G-P employee pointed out that he knows fellow employees who would no doubt have put off recent new purchases — like pickup trucks and snowmobiles — if they had known the end was near or the future was murky.

G-P employees are certainly not the first and won't be the last American manufacturing workers to see their jobs go up in smoke. But that doesn't make it any easier to bear.

For whatever reasons, Georgia-Pacific decided to steal off into the night rather than stand up and tell the community what was happening and why.

That was their right. But it will also be their legacy.