The Blue Ridge Paper Products' mill bought earlier this year in the United States by New Zealand billionaire Graeme Hart has started cutting its workforce.
Hart's company has told union leaders it will eliminate 122 waged jobs at the main Canton mill and at its Waynesville finishing plant,through attrition, the Asheville Citizen-Times reported.
The company is apparently also reducing its salaried work force and has already lost its chief executive, Richard Lozyniak, when the North Carolina company's head office was recently moved to Tennessee. Hart's New Zealand-based Rank Group bought Blue Ridge on July 31 and is merging it with his Evergreen Packaging company in Pine Bluff, Arkansas.
Evergreen Packaging has 1150 workers, and until now Blue Ridge employed about 1300 people at its Canton mill and a finishing plant in Waynesville, plus about 700 workers at other locations around the country.
The new business will be called Evergreen Packaging Group.
Howard Taylor, head of United Steelworkers Local 507, said company officials told him this week that it would reduce the hourly job count at Blue Ridge between now and the end of 2008: 122 workers won't be replaced when they retire or leave the company for other reasons.
Taylor said about 28 salaried workers - who are not represented by the union - have been told they are being let go.
Until the July takeover by Hart's Rank Group, Blue Ridge was partly owned by its workers.
Blue Ridge has lost money for six years in a row.
The company has an older work force; Taylor said some of the workers who received payment for their Blue Ridge shares will be retiring in coming months.
Some of the workers will be replaced by automation, and some maintenance jobs will be contracted out.
Taylor said the company's willingness to invest in new machinery is a positive sign, but there were worries about whether fewer people could do the same amount of work.
Blue Ridge lost US$7.6 million ($10 million) in the second quarter - because of a planned maintenance shutdown - compared with a US$2 million gain for the same period a year ago.
Hart is now the world's second biggest manufacturer of drink cartons, after spending about $4.5 billion on buying up companies.
