IP to Begin 7-Week Shutdown of Oregon Mill

International Paper will begin a seven-week shutdown of its Springfield, Ore., containerboard mill to rebuild the plant’s boiler, according to a spokeswoman at the company’s Memphis headquarters. The downtime will begin Oct. 23, and the mill will start gearing up again for production on Dec. 14, the spokeswoman Amy Sawyer says.

Most of the mill’s 240 employees will continue to work through the downtime, except for 114 hourly workers who will be laid off for the week of Thanksgiving, she said.

Sawyer added that as many as 38 hourly employees also could be laid off the week after Thanksgiving. To minimize layoffs, most of the boiler repair work will be conducted by mill employees, rather than by contract laborers, she says.

“The end goal is to keep as many of our employees working during the outage as possible,” Sawyer says.

Greg Pallesen, vice president of AWPPW, the union that represents hourly workers at International Paper’s Springfield mill, said workers will receive holiday pay for Thanksgiving and many have vacation days they could draw on for the rest of the layoff.

The planned downtime at the Springfield mill will be the longest in recent memory, Sawyer says. International Paper is taking the longer-than-usual downtime at the Springfield mill to repair the boiler; it is not related to general business conditions, Sawyer says.

As for the long-term prospects of the Springfield mill, Sawyer says International Paper continually looks for ways to be more competitive.

“That doesn’t translate to any specific plans at this point, but the team at Springfield is working hard to reduce costs, improve efficiencies and reliability, and match our production to our customer demand,” she says.

Sawyer declined to disclose how much International Paper is spending on the boiler improvements in Springfield.