BUCKSPORT, Maine - Tomorrow will mark six weeks since Verso Paper announced it would shut down its mill in the town of Bucksport. The closure, scheduled to take place in December, will cost more than 500 workers their jobs. Roughly 80 percent of the workforce is over the age of 50. A few out-of-state mills have sent word to officials in Bucksport that they have some openings for experienced papermakers. But many workers are pulling together resumes and attending job fairs in search of new opportunities - that will likely pay them a lot less than they've been making at Verso.
Gary Hopkins carries his future in a beige manila folder. Hopkins, who's 57, opens it and thumbs through some of the flyers he's picked up at this crowded job fair inside a gymnasium in Orland.
"You know, we've got Nextlink, which I didn't realize was a call center, but it is," he says. "RH Foster. Lowes.com...a lot of jobs there. Darling's."
Jay Field: "You ever sold cars?"
Gary Hopkins: "No. Like to, though."
He's also looking at elder care. Hopkins shows me another flyer. "We've got the Loving Touch," he says. That's short for Loving Touch In-Home Care.
"A lot of people want to stay in their homes and we help provide that care for them," says Elizabeth Bunker, who oversees client care at Loving Touch.
Bunker says the Bangor agency is hiring. "We provide our own training: Dementia training, Alzheimer's training, personal training. We have a lot of people from different fields. Past nurses that come to work for us. School bus drivers."
Jay Field: "Do you have any former mill workers working for you?"
Elizabeth Bunker: "We do not. And we certainly are hoping we can find someone here
A position in health care would be a sort of homecoming for Gary Hopkins, who started at Eastern Maine Medical Center back n the 70s. He also worked on motorcycles. But it's the mill, along the bank of the Penobscot River, that's been constant in Hopkins' life. He's worked there 38 years.
"It's hard work," he says. "A lot of it's shift work. You're working a lot of weekends. You're working nights, when everyone else is sleeping. The mechanical side, where I work, is dangerous. Very dangerous."
But with those risks and hardships came security. "I've always had health care and I've always had benefits," he says. "And to have those pulled out from under you, on top of losing your salary, that's one of the things a lot of guys are looking at hard."
Hopkins is eight years away from retirement. He's paid off the mortgage on his house. But he has lots of other bills to pay and he worries about the high cost of health care. Next week, he plans to attend a workshop, explaining the ins and outs of the Affordable Care Act.
What he'd prefer, though, would be to find a new job with full health benefits. Even if he finds one, it's not likely to match the pay offered by the mill, where 80 percent of the workforce is over the age of 50, most workers have been making more than $50,000 or $60,000 a year.
To improve their chances at replacing that level of income, some workers have decided to go back to school. Down the hall from the job fair, Kerry Hafford lists the requirements for an associate's degree in surgical technology at Eastern Maine Community College. She's consulting with Chris Monroe, who's 40 and runs a paper machine at the Bucksport mill. When he joined Verso four-and-a-half years ago, Monroe was hoping he'd be able to work there until he retired.
Now, he's forced to consider new options. "I need to look for some place I can stay for the next 20-25 years," he says, " 'cause that's what I'm looking at."
Health care is one of the fastest growing parts of Maine's economy. Monroe says he's willing to get whatever training is necessary to break into the field. He's a painter by trade. I've always been able to find a job, he says; trying to find another career is going to be the hard part.