Former employees of the Tembec planer mill and other unionized Tembec employees are planning a demonstration in front of Tembec’s regional office on Cranbrook Street noon Thursday to protest more than a dozen planer workers not receiving severance pay when the mill shut down in 2007.

But the demonstration Nov. 26 may be in vain because the company has no intention of budging from its position, says Dennis Rounsville, vice president of Tembec’s B.C. Operations and Chief Forester.

“As we’ve said before, we’re abiding by the contract. We haven’t made any decision to close the facility. Like a lot of other Tembec facilities, the planer is closed simply because of the market.”

Poor market conditions, resulted in one shift being laid off at Tembec’s Elko sawmill and with that capacity gone there’s no need to run the Cranbrook planer mill at the present time, Rounsville says.

“We don’t need the same level of planer capacity, but there’s been no long-term decision made to close the Cranbrook planer mill. If we we’re to return to a normal market with the logs we believe are available we would still have to run the Cranbrook planer mill to plane up all the wood. We don’t have the capacity at our other mills.”

However, Doug Singer, financial secretary of United Steelworkers Local 1-405, accuses Tembec of breaking a promise to pay severance to the planer employees outside the collective agreement.

“When the sawmill shut down in 1998, the company paid severance pay outside the collective agreement. The same commitment was made to the Cranbrook planer employees in 2004 … It’s time for the company to live up to its commitment and pay the severance they committed to paying,” Singer says.

The situation is coming to a head this week because on Nov. 27 the laid off planer workers will no longer be deemed to be Tembec employees and they will longer be able to make any claims against the company, Singer says.

“We are disgusted with the company for not living up to their original commitment. All we’re asking is for the company to show some good will and do it because it’s the right thing to do.”

But Rounsville says the company offered the laid off planer employees jobs at its other operations wherever they could but few planer workers took up the company’s offer. Singer says it would be difficult for most the men to move because they have families in Cranbrook and were reluctant to move if the planer was going to reopen again in the future.

Meanwhile, Rounsville says last week a little bit of light broke through the dark clouds that have been hanging over the lumber industry for the past two years. Lumber future prices hit the $250 mark after languishing below $200 per thousand-board beet for many months, which is a hopeful price for the industry, Rounsville says.

“It’s a major improvement and we can only hope it will hold up for the future.”

Mountain Pine Beetle mortality has also started to slow down in central B.C. because there’s not much left for the six-legged insect to eat. But the pine beetle outbreak has yet to hit its peak in Southern B.C., he says.

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