Rumford Paper Workers (USW 900) Ratify New Contract with Wage Increases

USW 900's negotiating team in July. Courtesy of USW 900.

Earlier this month members of USW Local 900 at the Nine Dragons mill in Rumford voted 83 percent to ratify a new contract with a 10 percent general wage increase over the next three years. The new three-year contract also includes improvements to health insurance and vacation accruals as well as several wage adjustments to various trades in the mill. John Perry IV, President of Local 900, said that it was the best contract the workers had seen in many years.

“We didn’t have any concessions and we moved the bar on wages, shift differentials and vacations and updated a lot of outdated language,” said Perry. “That’s something I hadn’t seen in my entire career where every contract we ever had we were going through a resale, bankruptcy or Chapter 11. It was always doom and gloom and we were making concessions across the board. This was the first contract I’ve seen that we were able to move the needle in the right direction.”

The contract provides a wage increase of 4 percent the first year, 3 percent for the second year and 3 percent the third year. On the top of that, utility boiler operators and workers in the woodyard, treatment plant, and other departments will see wage adjustments of up to $3 per hour.

“These wage adjustments will help attract and retain skilled maintenance workers, electricians and boiler operators,” said Perry. “It was really crucial that the company did this.”

It was Perry’s first time negotiating a contract as union president and he began holding organizing meetings in 2021 to prepare his members for a fight. Instead of mailing members bargaining surveys, which often never get filled out, he prioritized face-to-face interactions and spent a lot of time in the factory meeting with members and taking down their concerns. He also held negotiating workshops once a month after membership meetings that were open to all members.

“It was a very open door, casual meeting and we all sat around the table and talked about nothing but the contract,” said Perry. “A lot of people brought a lot of good ideas and we recorded the minutes from the meetings so it was really easy to translate them from their suggestions and do official proposals that we put across the table.”

Perry also sat in on USW negotiations with the Twin Rivers mill in Madawaska to prepare for negotiations.

“It was a wicked good training opportunity for me to sit through that,” he said. “They put some proposals on the table that I though ‘ooh, we should have that in our contract too.’ We were also able to share different proposals and ideas.”