For most of its history, the pulp and paper industry moved forward by keeping skill tightly concentrated.
Mills worked because they held onto people who knew the process in their bones: operators who could hear a bearing change, mechanics who understood alignment by feel, engineers who knew when chemistry was drifting before the lab confirmed it.
Those people were paid accordingly, because their judgment controlled uptime, quality, and safety.
That balance started to slip when labor was reclassified from a strategic asset to a consumable commodity. Diversity programs arrived as a consequence of that shift, during years of weak margins, aging machines, and limited capital.
On the surface, the language was about modernization and culture. On the floor, the effect was simpler: a larger labor pool and less pressure to pay for long-earned expertise.
Hiring and promotion shifted away from deep process mastery toward broader criteria. Pay bands compressed. Senior operators lost leverage.
Apprenticeship tracks stretched thinner because fewer people stayed long enough to justify the investment. When experienced hands left, they did not leave behind clean instructions. They took judgment with them; the kind that never fits into an SOP or a control loop.
Pulp and paper mills do not tolerate confusion well. They depend on shared understanding: fiber behavior, recaust chemistry, kiln response, machine alignment, and how all of it behaves under stress.
When teams speak the same technical language, problems get solved quickly and improvements hold. As coherence declined, coordination costs rose.
Meetings replaced fixes. Documentation replaced experience. Variation crept in, quietly at first.
The decline followed a familiar pattern. Reliability slipped. Quality became harder to hold. Maintenance costs climbed. Capital returns weakened. Management began calling the mill “non-competitive” or “end of life,” often without seeing that the technical core had already eroded. Closure arrived later, framed as a market outcome rather than a human one.
This was not malicious so much as it was an incentive chain. Hiring to check boxes lowered short-term labor costs. The numbers looked better for a while. The operating reality kept getting worse. Once the core knowledge thinned out, recovery stopped being realistic.
Moral: A mill survives by pushing back against entropy. Skilled people slow disorder: misaligned human systems speed it up. There is a threshold where lost mastery, rising variation, and coordination drag overwhelm the ability to recover from upsets. When that line is crossed, closure is no longer a choice; it is the natural result.
About Mike Ryan
Mike Ryan is recognized for enhancing operational reliability and efficiency, combining deep technical expertise with a strong focus on training and process improvement across a wide range of industrial settings.
He can be reached by email at
