Retooling In Timber Town -- Many Laid-Off Workers Are Learning New Trades, But Jobs Can Be Scarce And Pay Low For Any Work They Find

Brenda Mills, whose parents raised seven kids on an Aberdeen shake-cutter's salary, learned early on how to take care of herself.

"You learned to say, `Please pass the butter,' or get stabbed with a fork in the back of your hand," says the 36-year-old former timber worker.

Mindful of the deprivation that comes with too many mouths and not enough food, Mills was always a planner.

When she got out of high school she compiled a good work record at a cranberry juice processing mill. Her hard work there persuaded ITT-Rayonier to hire her as a quality-control technician in their Hoquiam mill that made vanillin, a byproduct of the wood-pulp process, on Dec. 18, 1983.

She remembers the date. She remembers the respect she had for the large company and the way it was run. She remembers that she called in sick only three days in more than nine years.

And she remembers the end.

She worked the last night the vanillin plant operated, "a weird, weird, sober night," in rainy November. "I didn't realize it was the end until a maintenance man told me that Rhone Poulenc (a company competitor) had purchased the recipe."

"It was like a graveyard."

Mills was not altogether unprepared. The plant was known to be up for sale, and for the prior 18 months she and her husband saved as much as they could of their salary, about $25 an hour between the two of them. Their home was almost paid for.

Still, the mother of two teenagers was unprepared for the aftermath.

"For three weeks I walked around in a daze. I would get up and eat and lie down on the couch and go back to sleep. A friend said, `maybe you should keep your hands busy.' So I knitted afghans. At the end of that, I went to the college."

After an experience one counselor to timber workers describes as "like a death," Mills has decided to write her ticket out of the timber industry.

Her husband has been laid off from his job in a plywood mill; she can see the writing on the wall if she doesn't find something new to do - more layoffs, more downturns, more uncertainty.

She's studying for a degree in civil engineering. Programs at Grays Harbor College in Aberdeen have taught her that "we have a choice of careers. We also have our own unique, ideal position in life. If you've got the drive, anybody can be anything."

Mills also knows that for reasons of background, opportunity and just plain will, she is one of the lucky ones. She is a realist - not everyone was, or is. The day of the plant closing, she recalls, "my concern was for people who hadn't realized the end had come."

Today, people who are helping Northwest timber workers struggle with the end of their livelihoods say that's the hardest part: helping people realize that the end has come and that they have to move on.

This spring, when President Clinton announced his plan to preserve old-growth forests and retrain timber workers, the White House estimated that the plan to reduce cutting in Pacific Northwest forests would cost the Northwest 6,000 timber jobs - 2,100 in Washington.

His "Northwest Economic Adjustment Initiative" would create 8,000 new jobs and 5,400 retraining opportunities for laid-off timber workers.

This trend was old news in Washington state, which has struggled to absorb at least 7,339 unemployed timber workers laid off in the past three years, according to state figures. That number includes only people who worked for companies that paid into the unemployment compensation fund, not independent workers like truck drivers or owners of mom-and-pop sawmills.

Of these workers, 1,925 are receiving retraining at one of the state's vocational or community colleges, which guarantees them 102 weeks of unemployment benefits instead of the usual 26 or 30. Of that group, 1,466 have completed the retraining, and 1,074 have returned to the workforce at an average wage of $11.47 an hour - about a seventh of the total group.

No one knows where the rest are. State unemployment forms don't require a report on what happens to people when they cease receiving benefits. Some people never qualify for benefits because they worked for themselves.

Bob Hughes, a former timber worker who now works in the state Department of Employment Security's Displaced Timber Worker program, says some stay in the industry by moving elsewhere, sometimes mailing their paycheck to the families that stay behind.

Some have gone east of the Cascades, where the spotted-owl crisis hasn't restricted the cut.

"And some of them," says Hughes, "just sit at home and wait."

One problem, says Hughes, is that the sequence of layoffs and rehiring in the timber industry has become a way of life.

"They're betting that something good is going to come along, that this is going to expand or that is going to reopen," he says.

As an example, the paper portion of the ITT-Rayonier mill complex in Hoquiam has announced plans to reopen under local ownership, though with only about one-third of the 600-strong workforce it employed before.

But like Mills, other workers have decided that they have had enough.

A WAVE OF WORKERS

For those who have cast their lot with change, Grays Harbor College is bearing the brunt of a wave of workers trying to find new occupations.

In 1989, the college served about 1,220 students. By last spring, enrollment had risen to more than 1,700 students and is expected to reach 1,900 this fall.

The college is enrolling ex-timber workers in record numbers, and high-school graduates in the area are finally realizing that there's no future in the timber industry.

Much of this expansion has been paid for with supplemental dollars granted the college by the state Legislature for worker retraining.

The latest batch - about $1 million of the college's $7 million budget - will be lost if the tax-rollback Initiative 602 passes this November. The measure would mean the college would lose new money earmarked for a worker-retraining program.

Initiative 602 would automatically repeal any new tax and fees passed by the 1993 Legislature.

Many workers who choose to enroll in retraining have a powerful incentive to do so - extension of their unemployment benefits. Other state grants pay for their tuition and books. Still, not everyone can afford to return to school.

"It's the young and unattached, the insecure, it's the guy who has five or six kids still at home that is having a tough time," says Hughes.

Ex-workers say the going is tough. It's the creative who have survived, some going back to the Middle Ages to find a new way of finding work. Old-fashioned apprenticeships

Naaman Riffe works for himself. Loves what he does. Makes a good living at it. Approaches things with a gentle humor hatched in the West Virginia hills and adapted to the stormy coast of Washington, "a place where you've got to smoke your pipe upside down nine months out of the year," as Riffe says.

It was probably inevitable that one of Grays Harbor County's many out-of-work timber workers would approach Riffe, a farrier, about how to make a living.

Working for yourself, beholden to no company that will give you a paycheck on Monday and hand you a layoff notice on Friday, looked very good to Craig Thiessen, a laid-off mill worker and union president.

Thiessen, a brawny man in a cowboy hat who sells cattle on the side, knew that Riffe had more work than he knew what to do with. Like Riffe, Thiessen loves horses. Like Riffe, he's not afraid to get a few bruises and breaks in the service of horseshoeing.

So he went to Riffe and asked him to teach him the business, an old-fashioned apprenticeship, nothing more or less.

The apprenticeship program is a new one for the college, and has made for some interesting matched pairs.

Phyllis Kulich worked at the ITT-Rayonier paper mill for 34 years. Despite having put in enough years to retire with full benefits, Kulich wanted a new start after she was laid off. She'd always been interested in upholstery, but the nearest training program, at Bates Technical College in Tacoma, was an hour and a half away.

Kulich's attitude was kick-started by New Chance, a program at Grays Harbor College designed to help timber workers achieve basic high-school skills and examine their own lives.

"A lot of these people have never really stopped and thought: How do I feel about myself?" says Leon Lead, a former timber worker and New Chance coordinator.

Kulich found herself falling off platforms and into the arms of fellow ex-timber workers, an exercise, among many others, designed to teach trust and the necessity of pulling together.

Lead found her a Hoquiam upholsterer, a wisecracking, red-haired grandmother named Dee Elders, who agreed to take Phyllis on as an apprentice.

ANCIENT UPHOLSTERING CRAFT

In exchange for a small stipend paid by the college and whatever revenue Kulich's work brings in, Elders teaches her student the ancient craft of upholstering.

Brad Berry, a former forester, worked out his own apprenticeship - he has a job with an Aberdeen engineering firm today because he worked for them for months for free.

"I'd been in contact with this firm since 1992, begging for a job," says Berry. He pitched his offer of help to an engineer "who said, `What do I have to lose?' "

When two job offers from other firms in Kitsap County came up, Berry's firm offered him a salary.

As for Riffe and Thiessen, on a recent day they were shoeing a horse named Rodney. Rodney is used for trail rides and has seen a fair amount of action on asphalt, which is hard on a horse's feet.

Riffe starts shaping the shoes to the horse's feet - warming them on the anvil, testing them, warming them again, testing them again."He's the Cadillac of shoers," says another customer, sipping coffee and watching.

Riffe is a practical man - in West Virginia, they used ponies for farming and log-skidding, not pets.

His father taught him to treat an animal just as nice as it treats you, no more, no less.

The idea of the apprenticeship appeals to him. "If they matched every guy with a trade with some guy who's out of work, it could work out real good," Riffe says.

While these workers have found their niche, others say their retraining and the incredible shrinking job market have proved a poor match.

NO JOBS, FEW PROSPECTS

Allen Daniels is an ex-police officer, timber worker and bartender who got training as a paralegal last year to help his transition out of the timber economy.

The problem is, timber dollars still fuel "the Harbor," as its natives call the Grays Harbor and Pacific counties area, and there were no openings for paralegals in the area.

"You can be a box boy at Swanson's," says Daniels, "and if there's no more logging, you're out of a job."

Daniels is stuck in the Harbor, by circumstance and preference. He owns a home in Montesano, and his wife is a deputy court clerk in Montesano. His family - his wife and two children - are existing on half his unemployment check (the rest goes to his ex-wife) and her Montesano salary, $6.80 an hour.

"If it wasn't for the church, there are times when we wouldn't eat," he says. He was laid off from a job as a bartender four weeks ago, when the restaurant that employed him closed from lack of business.

Daniels isn't bitter - he has nothing but praise for the people from state agencies who have helped him.

"The state has helped tremendously," he says. "If it wasn't for the state I couldn't have gone to school."

But he's getting tired of the grind, though he's thinking of going back to school to get a two-year degree in criminal justice, which could enhance his ability to get another policeman's job.

"I'm almost 40 years old," he says. "I need steady work, and I haven't had that since 1981. I'm a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none."

Leah Goode worked as an electrical drafter in a firm that produced machinery for other timber firms. Though she, too, is pursuing a degree in criminal justice, the mother of a 16-year-old is scared of what the future holds when she graduates next year. She thinks companies already see her as too old to invest in.

"I'm 42," she says. "I know companies say they don't discriminate, but. . . . I don't have any hard proof, but it seems like most people I know in that age group are having this experience. I've had several interviews and left feeling good about it. Then I never heard from them again."

But she's determined to find some job, somewhere. "I even applied for a job in Antarctica," she says, laughing.

SOME WON'T RELOCATE

Most people are not as willing to relocate. People who work with displaced timber workers say they're amazed at their determination to remain in "the Harbor."

Hughes, of the Employment Security Department, says that of the 2,000-plus workers who have received retraining aid from the state, only two have ever requested assistance with relocation.

That fierce attachment means long commutes for some - to Olympia, Chehalis, even Tacoma. It means a poor match between some of the retraining programs and fields for which there simply are no jobs in Southwest Washington.

And in the long run, it means that the key to a successful transition for timber workers is not just retraining, but economic diversification.

Just since 1990, Grays Harbor County has lost the ITT-Rayonier pulp-mill complex, seven sawmills, 29 shake mills and an untold number of logging companies, fabricators, machine companies, bearing companies, belt companies and saw shops, says Dave Rux of the local chapter of the International Woodworkers' Union.

In short, the job market is drying up.

"The key is economic development," says Randy Volkman, head of displaced-worker programs for the Grays Harbor County unemployment office.

"These people live here, own their homes and raised their kids here. It's going to take time, but Grays Harbor people are pretty resilient. They'll come back. The work ethic here is phenomenal."

Volkman says a retraining program for 241 workers that ended in 1991 placed 82 percent of them in jobs at more than 90 percent of their former salaries. "But we're finding it more and more difficult to place people," he says. "There's no doubt about it."

Hughes says that is the message he wants Clinton to hear as he prepares his aid package for timber workers.

"We need some money to assist in training, and they need jobs to go to when they're finished. If we retrained all of them, a year from now there'd be nothing for them to do. We have to create something for them."