After manufacturing paper products for nearly 68 years, the Resolute Forest Products plant in Charleston, Tennessee, produced its last pulp and paper products on Jan. 13, and those employed in the paper operations have spent most of the past two weeks cleaning up the idled assets.
On Wednesday and Thursday, many of the 350 workers about to lose their jobs looked at a new job future by participating in job fairs at the Resolute site where other employers in the area came eager to hire the displaced workers.
“We have 60 job openings right now, and we hope to be able to fill them with many of those being laid off at Resolute,” Ken Collins, the site director at the nearby Wacker polysilicon plant in Charleston, said during an interview Thursday.
Wacker was among 21 employers who came to Resolute to try to find workers amid a persistently tight labor market. Resolute spokeswoman Seth Kursman said in an email that 20 Resolute employees immediately landed jobs and more than 50 others are pursuing follow-up interviews.
John Gentry, mayor of McMinn County, Tennessee, whose father worked at Bowater for 37 years before he retired, said last month he laments the end of the paper-producing era at Resolute and its predecessor, Bowater. The company will continue making tissues with about 195 workers, but that is only a fraction of the 1,500 workers that were once employed at one of the nation’s biggest newsprint and pulp plants.