LITTLE ROCK — Georgia-Pacific will lay off about 300 workers in Fordyce for up to six months, idling the first plywood plant built in the South, the wood products firm said Friday.
The layoffs will be effective at the end of the month, said Melodie Ruse, a spokesman for Georgia-Pacific in Atlanta. The company blamed the downturn in the housing market for the layoffs.
“We had been trying to run as long as we could for our employees as well as our customers who were still buying,” Ruse said. “We did have a few short-term layoffs, but we’ve gone about as long as we could go.”
The mill is the secondlargest employer in town behind Millcreek of Arkansas, said Fordyce Mayor William Lyon. Millcreek is a school for emotionally disturbed and developmentally disabled children.
And the effect of the layoffs is not limited to his town or employees of Georgia-Pacific. People travel from throughout south Arkansas to work at the Fordyce sawmill, Lyon said.
About 50 loggers will lose their jobs, he said.
“The logging crews, the mechanics and the people who supply parts to them will be hurt,” Lyon said. “ It’sa lick, don’t kid yourself.”
Georgia-Pacific closed a line at a plywood plant in Crossett in 2007, with 300 workers losing their jobs, and in 2008 closed a plywood mill and a sawmill in Springhill, La., about 25 miles south of Magnolia, Ark., which cost about 400 workers their jobs. Those were announced as terminations from the outset rather than layoffs, Ruse said.
About 50 management and maintenance workers will remain at the Fordyce plywood mill for now, Ruse said.
Georgia-Pacific’s oriented strand board mill in Fordyce, with about 100 employees, will not be affected.
Since 1980, oriented strand board, which is cheaper than plywood, has captured a majority of the residential construction market.
Opened in 1964, the plywood mill was the first in the country to make plywood from Southern pine rather than Douglas fir, a softwood tree native to the Pacific Northwest.
Home sales have declined for more than three years and the construction of new homes has also dropped off.
“They aren’t building [many] new houses,” Lyon said, “and there is no need to make plywood and just store it.”
The idling was not a surprise, the mayor said.
“The handwriting was on the wall when [Georgia-Pacific] began to haul out chip-up plywood logs in Crossett and turn it into paper,” Lyon said. “So the whole town [of Fordyce] knew it was coming before it really happened.”
The Georgia-Pacific workers earned between $8 and $12 an hour, Lyon said. Ruse declined to discuss salaries at the plant.
Dallas County had an unemployment rate of 7.5 percent in August.
“Fordyce honestly has survived pretty well,” Lyon said. “The people down here are pretty self-sufficient.” Georgia-Pacific also has a paper mill, chemical plant, softwood plywood mill and a softwood lumber mill in Crossett; and a sawmill and plywood mill in Gurdon. The company makes Dixie paperproducts in Fort Smith.
Koch Industries Inc. of Wichita, Kan., acquired George-Pacific in 2005, and Koch (pronounced coke) retained the Georgia-Pacific name.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 10/24/2009