Stora Enso plans to close the Sunila factory. The employees criticized the company’s communication method. Some heard about the termination of their jobs from relatives.
Kotka
Mika Kolehmainen stands in the yard of the detached house he bought a month ago in Kotka. Words are lacking.
“You can’t say it out loud. It was a really great situation,” says Kolehmainen sarcastically.
“There are no beautiful words, so it’s better not to say them.”
In the morning, Kolehmainen, who works at Sunila’s pulp mill, received an email: an information session via Teams at ten o’clock. In the info, Stora Enso said it plans to close the factory. It means the end of work for around 250 people, Kolehmaini and his colleagues.
The employees followed the information together in the coffee room. The company’s management spoke on the computer screen, and the matter was explained first in English and then in Finnish.
It was quiet in the coffee room. This was not expected. Kolehmainen worked at the factory for thirteen years. He says the world collapsed.
“When they dropped that bomb. More support has come from friends than from the employer.”
It has been agreed with a group of colleagues that one will be kept. You can immediately call others if you feel bad.
A large part of the factory’s employees are currently on summer vacation and laid off for three months starting in July.
Mika Kolehmainen was visibly shocked by the news of the factory closing. “To school or to work. There are few options,” he says. Kolehmainen bought a house a month ago, so the information came at the worst possible time. Kolehmainen still plans to continue the renovation.
The information about the closure plans came during the employees’ holidays.
Rasmus Roito woke up when my sister called and said she was really sorry for what happened. He heard about the factory closing from his sister and then read about it in the news. In his opinion, the briefing was miserable. Many first read about it in the media or heard from relatives.
Roito estimates that the multiplier effects of closing the factory are big in a city the size of Kotka.
“There will be collateral victims. The woman who lives with us runs that staff restaurant,” says Roito in front of the factory gates. Her spouse is the entrepreneur of a restaurant operating at Sunila’s factory.
Roito says that he himself could be ready to move out of the Kotka region for work, but he is not so sure if his partner is ready for that.
It’s hard not to think about the future, but Roito still plans to try to focus on the holiday.
“It will probably be difficult, even impossible.”
Julius Tepponen and Rasmus Roito left the factory for home. The information session interrupted Roito’s vacation.
Also chief steward Markku Krautsuk is confused. In May, Kymen Sanomat made news in the city about moving rumors, according to which the factory was about to close. At that time, Stora Enso’s director of communications Fairy tale Härkönen flatly denied to the newspaper that this was being done.
In Sunila, it was still expected last fall that the company would announce that it would invest in an industrial-scale lignode plant in the area. The news never came.
The factory’s production has been limited to one and a half months. Employees knew how to expect some news, but not this kind. The timing was also a surprise: the employees thought that the improvement in economic conditions would have been expected at least until the end of the layoffs.
“Nothing has been decided yet, but I have to admit that this does not seem good,” says Krautsuk.
Markku Krautsuk, the chief shop steward of the pulp mill workers, was confused by the news of the mill’s closure. He says that the change negotiations will come on a really fast schedule. “I’ve thought about this, you can’t deny it, but I’m very confused,” he said on Thursday.
Sunila does not currently produce pulp. The factory will probably not be started again.
Employees are now starting to think about their own strategy for change negotiations. The Paper Union will help.
According to Krautsuk, the factory’s employees have very different life situations. There are a lot of 20-40 year olds and families. He hasn’t had time to think about himself yet.
“53 years will be measured in August. I’m probably not the hottest hottie on the job market.”
Krautsuk has worked at the factory for 24 years.
“We can’t do anything about the economic figures, it’s not up to us,” Krautsuk says disappointedly.
More than ten years ago, the situation was similar. In August 2009, Stora Enso announced that it would close the entire factory, but at the end of November the company announced that it would take overtime, and Sunila was restarted at record speed.
“We have risen once, but we will hardly rise from this”, the chairman of the professional department Marko Kaitasuo says.
The chairman of the professional department, Marko Kaitasuo, plans to focus first on change negotiations and then think about his own future.
According to Kaitasuo, the employment opportunities for process workers in the Kotka area are not very good. There could be employment opportunities within Stora Enso.
“But then it would mean moving to the bottom of the Pärämere. There will be jobs in Oulu in the future, when the cardboard machine starts up, there will be several dozen jobs there,” he estimates.
With Hannu Olsén has 44 joint years with the factory behind him. The information also came as a complete surprise to him.
“Yes, I was quite sure that this was not the end yet. Now I’m starting to believe that it is.”
Right It is located next to the Sunila factory Alvar Aalton once a residential area designed for factory workers. Depending on the direction of the wind, there is sometimes a smell from the factory. Nowadays, many pensioners live in the area.
Pensioner Leena Sven has lived in Sunila for 33 years. He heard about the factory closing in the morning in a taxi.
“I got chills when I heard that. It’s a tough place for many, for example for people with housing debt.”
There were only a handful of employees at the Sunila factory when the news of the factory’s closing plans came out.
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