Safety couldn't have even been seen as a secondary issue. It was only an issue when there was an incident, and then only for a short while till that could be forgotten. Rather than performing preventative maintenance to ensure equipment is kept in good working order, it is more often ran until failure. At which time managers claim that they had no knowledge of the equipment issues even though they were notified continually. They just decided to look past the problems until it couldn't be overlooked any longer. The last couple of years before our location was told it was closing, the management team at our location must have become fearful for their lives. They hired Black Water security to perform roving patrols on the mill property, even though the mill already had its own security company team. The Company then began placing surveillance cameras all around the mill property. The excuse for the cameras in the area I worked in was for wood quality issues. This was an absolute lie. The wood chips we receive are 1 inch square by about a quarter of an inch thick. The closest camera that was directed at a woodpile was about 50 yards away. The others were directed at work areas. These cameras didn't have the resolution to zoom in close enough to verify wood quality. Instead these cameras were simply put in place to watch employees. All of our teams performed their jobs without fail as long they had the equipment necessary to perform their duties. We have the stats to prove it. It seems it is easier to point the finger at employees for loss of production rather than fixing the problems that create loss of production. A good example of this is a conveyor system in the pulp mill that has been randomly shutting down by itself for the past four years which halts wood flow to the chip bins. The fix from management was to cut the wood flow in half. However, this wasn't enough wood flow to keep up with the demands for production. That in turn caused management to point the finger at employees. Management claimed employees were purposefully not sending enough wood to keep up with production, when it was managements decision to reduce wood flow by half to begin with. This is just one of many examples of why this mill is going out of business. It has been poorly managed for so long, it's at the point of no return. This is another sad end to a workplace that produced a living for countless families for well over 100 years here in the mountains of Western North Carolina.
