PAGE 12 | February 5 , 2016 | NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
Laid-off Oregon union millwright goes to D.C.
Steve Phillips of AWPPW was
Rep. DeFazio’s guest at State of
the Union, and didn’t like what
he heard
By Don McIntosh
Associate editor
Steve Phillips is the wandering
millwright … but not by choice.
In 1974, right out of high
school, he went to work at the
Menasha corrugated paper mill
in Coos Bay where his father
worked. But the 2003 closure of
the mill, then owned by Weyer-
haeuser, would only be his first.
In 2004 he moved to Albany and
got a job at a Weyerhaeuser pa-
per mill there. That too closed, in
2009. In 2010 he went to work
at the SP Fiber Technologies pa-
per mill in Newberg. It closed in-
definitely in November 2015.
And Phillips isn’t even the
unluckiest member of his union,
Association of Western Pulp and
Paper Workers (AWPPW). One
fellow union member is called
the “black cloud,” because he’s
gone through so many layoffs
and closures.
In January, Phillips got a
chance to tell his union’s story in
Washington, D.C., when Oregon
Congressman Peter DeFazio in-
vited him to be his guest for
President Obama’s final State of
the Union Address. Phillips was
there to serve as a flesh-and-
blood rebuttal to the president’s
happy talk about the the pending
Trans Pacific Partnership, a
NAFTA-style deal with Japan,
Vietnam, Malaysia, and eight
other Pacific Rim nations.
Phillips has repeatedly felt the
impacts of America’s trade pol-
icy. Paper is a capital-intensive
industry, relying on expensive
machines that Phillips, as a mill-
wright, kept up and running. A
millwright is an industrial me-
chanic, a highly-skilled jack of
all trades. Phillips worked 13
years at the Coos Bay mill be-
fore he was able to become a
millwright apprentice, and after
three years of training, became
a journeyman in 1990.
But paper is also a trade-sen-
sitive industry. In recent
decades, U.S. paper mills have
faced stiff competition from
Canada and developing coun-
tries like China and Indonesia.
Cardboard boxes are used to
ship goods, and as more and
more goods were made over-
seas, it made more sense to
make the boxes there too. Trade
was officially deemed a factor in
all three of the closures Phillips
went through.
As a union officer—he was
recording secretary at several lo-
cals—Phillips was several times
drafted to serve as a “peer advo-
cate,” helping his laid-off co-
workers access retraining, relo-
cation and extended unemploy-
ment benefits through the gov-
ernment’s Trade Act program
for workers dislocated by trade.
So he was a fitting choice for
DeFazio — a fierce critic of
America’s NAFTA-style trade
policy — to take to D.C. To help
DeFazio showcase the effects of
that policy, AWPPW, a division
of the United Brotherhood of
Carpenters, paid Phillips’ airfare.
So on his first-ever visit to the na-
tion’s capital, Phillips got to take
part in an anti-TPP press confer-
ence, tell his story to Carpenters
Political Director Tom Flynn,
and meet former House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi at an after-hours
party in the Capitol Building.
Phillips remembers the glory
days of Oregon’s unionized
wood products industry. When
he went to work at the Coos Bay
mill in 1974, his starting wage
was $4.82 an hour—at a time
when the minimum wage was
$1.65. “I didn’t have any dreams
of going to college, but I wasn’t
planning on staying there, but
boy, you get that first paycheck,
it’s like, ‘Oh, my god.’ The
money was just incredible.”
High wages enabled Phillips to
buy and restore an old Victorian
house, feed his motor-head ap-
petite for muscle cars, and even-
tually, to afford a vacation home
in Sunriver. Those opportunities
are no longer available to young-
er generations. When he began,
the paper mill was just one op-
tion; there were also chip, ply-
wood, and lumber mills through-
out Southern Oregon. But in the
1980s, logs started being shipped
overseas, and those mills began
to close. By the time Phillips’ mill
closed in 2003, there were no
similar jobs in the area.
That didn’t have to happen,
Phillips says, and he blames
U.S. trade policy.
Thanks in part to that trade
policy, Phillips is laying down
his tools at age 59. He never
married, so he’s the end of a
family line in the wood products
industry: His grandfather was a
logger, his uncle drove log
trucks, and his father and
brother, both now deceased,
were millwrights.
At the State of the Union,
Phillips promised DeFazio he
wouldn’t boo the president. But
he didn’t promise not to grit his
teeth at what he heard.
“I felt just really disappointed
that he could just stand up there
and lie to the American public,”
Phillips says.
“We forged a Trans-Pacific
Partnership,” Obama declared,
“to open markets, protect work-
ers and the environment, and ad-
vance American leadership in
Asia. It cuts 18,000 taxes on
products Made in America, and
supports more good jobs. With
TPP, China doesn’t set the rules
in that region, we do. You want
to show our strength in this cen-
tury? Approve this agreement.”
“Everything he said,” Phillips
says, “was a lie.… From a blue-
collar millworker, voter and tax-
payer point of view, the first thing
that scares me about the TPP is:
They spent seven years negotiat-
ing it in private, behind closed
doors. They kept it from Con-
gress. They kept it from the Amer-
ican public. If this thing was so
great, if this thing was so needed,
why would they do it that way?”