By Staff
college offer hope
While we welcome Georgia-Pacific as a new corporate citizen in our community, we regret that we have so many former Smurfit-Stone employees who are now out of jobs because of the transition.
Smurfit had at one time employed about 600 people, while GP has hired back about 500 workers.
The transition has been an opportunity for Jefferson Davis Community College and the Alabama Employment Service to step up and help these workers through a difficult time.
JDCC — true to its nature as a community college — has education and workforce training opportunities.
The employment service can offer resume help as well as job search techniques.
We know this is not an easy time for former Smurfit employees.
While we are glad that so many workers have gone on to new jobs with Georgia-Pacific — a company that we expect will be a solid presence in our community for years to come — we hope that our area will continue to draw new industry to help replace the jobs lost and create even more.
For the second time in as many days, power customers in the Brewton area were left without service Wednesday after a small fire at Southern Pine.
But like their counterparts at Alabama Power, Southern Pine officials — as well as area firefighters — were on the scene quickly to try to put out the blaze and return service.
No one ever likes the inconvenience of a power outage, but whether from a storm or a freak accident, they are inevitable sometimes.
We’re lucky that we have so many hard-working power company employees in our area who work to restore service as quickly as possible.