Maine loggers fight to unionize the North Woods

Update: On June 7, Governor Janet Mills signed LD 1459 into law, allowing loggers and wood haulers to collectively bargain with forest products companies. The following article was published on April 30.

“Loggers and haulers do some of the most difficult and dangerous work and they deserve a fair share of the wealth that they create. For too long, these workers have been exploited and mistreated. This law will finally give them the leverage to demand better rates for their labor and safer working conditions,” Dave Sullivan, Grand Lodge Rep for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers Eastern Territory, said in a statement.

For generations, Maine’s notoriously independent loggers have banded together in sporadic actions against the state’s largest landowners, who hold all the power in the North Woods. But those wildcat strikes never got the woodsmen any big labor victories, and many say the deck is stacked against them more than ever when it comes to issues of work and wages.

“There’s been so many things that’s been tried over the years, I think a lot of the guys in the industry are just resigned to the fact that you can’t win,” Maine Senate President Troy Jackson told Beacon. “They just keep their head down and go.”

Jackson, a fifth-generation logger from Allagash, first fell into politics in 1998 when he led a group of loggers to use their trucks to block the access roads that the major landowners used to move temporarily-hired Canadian workers, called “bonds,” and logs across the border.

Now, he is trying a different tack. He wants to unionize the North Woods by giving loggers and truckers the ability to legally meet and try to negotiate their tonnage rates and costs.

Loggers get paid by landowners a piece rate for every ton of wood they deliver to the sawmills. Currently, they are walled off from each other by federal antitrust laws, as a majority of the workers who do the cutting and hauling in the state’s $8.5 billion forest products industry are classified as independent contractors, not employees. Attempts to coordinate could constitute illegal price fixing.

Jackson has introduced legislation, LD 1459, which would exempt the state’s loggers from those antitrust laws. In response, about 200 loggers have already filed paperwork to start their own co-op, the New England Loggers Cooperative, electing Jackson as its first president.

In Augusta on March 29, a group of loggers stood behind Jackson at a press conference as the Democratic lawmaker introduced his proposal to members of the media. Many of the workers came forward despite fears of retaliation from the landowners, who they say can simply decide not to buy their wood anymore.

“At least we’ll all get blackballed together,” one of the loggers quipped.

Divided and conquered

Work in Maine’s North Woods has taken on an almost feudal dynamic. The state’s largest landowners completely set the terms by granting permits to self-employed loggers and truckers, who must sell them back the wood they have harvested. Since the landowners control the supply and its market, loggers have had no power to negotiate the price for their labor. They take what they are given.

The practices of some of the landowners they work for harken back to the Gilded Age industrialists of the early labor movement. The biggest, JD Irving, headquartered in New Brunswick, holds 1.3 million acres of forestland in the north and is part of energy giant Irving Group, which operates Canada’s largest refinery, eight distribution terminals, a fleet of delivery trucks and more than 800 fueling locations, on top of owning all of the province’s English-language newspapers. Seven Islands Land Co. is another major landholder in the state.

In the 1950s, loggers first called on state lawmakers to stop landowners from hiring Canadians, who would work for less. By 1975, a group called the Maine Woodsmen Association was trying to organize the loggers into a union, blockading the border for the first time a year earlier.

Jackson was first struck by this incredible power imbalance in 1981 when at a work site called High Landing. At just 12 years old, he stood alongside his father and more than 100 loggers who called a strike in response to a cut in their piece rates. When the landowner arrived at the site, he did not even get out of his car.

“He didn’t get out and ask, ‘How do we resolve this?’ Or, ‘I know it’s a big cut.’ He just said, ‘If you don’t go back to work in the morning, I’ll replace you all with Canadians.’ That was the whole negotiation,” Jackson said.

At the time, the loggers were paid like employees, drawing an hourly wage on top of getting paid for the use of their saws, cable skidders and trucks, which they typically owned. But that all changed in Jackson’s father’s time.

“One day he’s an employee, and the next day he was a contractor. I mean, it just happened like that,” he said.

The shift in the logging industry from using waged employees to independent contractors did not seem like a seismic one at the time, Jackson said. “Most people, myself included, weren’t really sophisticated enough to know what the downfall of that would be,” he said.

Loggers had long financed their own equipment, but by the 1990s they were also paying their own worker’s compensation and payroll taxes for Social Security.

Despite the reclassification, loggers resembled waged workers in nearly every way. The landowners still dictated when they cut, where they cut, and how much they cut.

“Companies like Irving control every aspect, from when you get up in the morning to when you go to bed at night,” Jackson said.

It was immediately apparent, as a sole proprietor, that the idea of the 40-hour work week or getting any sort of benefits was a joke, said Jackson, but the bigger, hidden cost in the shift to contractor status was that loggers now found themselves cut off from each other.

The workforce was fractured and loggers often did not know what their fellow woodsmen were getting for a ton of harvested wood. If they did talk, they had no power to negotiate collectively for higher rates.

Today most loggers do not know what rate they will get for their hauls week to week. They are forced to buy fuel and finance their equipment with an unpredictable revenue stream.

A recent study by the Maine Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Southern Maine found that, because wages are lower than those for comparable jobs, the state is potentially facing a shortage of loggers and truckers that could hinder the growth of the industry.

“No wonder you can’t find loggers,” Jackson said. “The landowners, as greedy as they are, they thought long-term about how to screw people, but they never thought long-term about how to keep the industry going.”

55-year-old Fort Kent resident Stacey Kelly, who has been working as a logger since 1981 and who led the 1998 blockade alongside Jackson, estimates that his hourly wage as a hauler, after he subtracts his costs, is around $17 an hour. “Maybe we can make it so our grandkids will get into the industry, because right now I wouldn’t recommend anyone getting into it. Not at all,” he said.

Loggers look to lobstermen for direction

Jackson and other loggers are making the case to state lawmakers that they should be added to the 1973 Maine Agricultural Marketing and Bargaining Act that exempted potato farmers and later fishermen from federal antitrust laws.

Normally, antitrust laws are supposed to protect consumers against businesses working together to fix prices in their industry. But individual farmers and fisherman do not typically have that kind of power in the market. For this reason, seven states have already exempted those sectors so that they can band together to gain equal footing with corporations.

As a model for how such an exemption might play out, loggers are looking to Maine’s lobstering community, which in 2013 formed their own co-op and union, the Maine Lobster Union, Local 207 of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW).

Dave Sullivan, a representative of IAMAW, helped the lobstermen unionize. The first step, he explained, was getting control of their product, which they previously sold on the docks to a middleman buyer and were forced to take whatever price was being offered.

“They needed to own the product from the seafloor to the consumers’ door, so we purchased a wholesale business that came with trucks and our own lobster pound,” he explained.

With time, the co-op gained members and was able to cut out many of the middlemen. But logging is different. Landowners will still own the product, with loggers essentially selling their labor, but Sullivan says there may be a lot that loggers can learn from the lobster co-op.

“We’d like to be able to transfer that model to the logging world,” he said, suggesting that loggers could work together to buy fuel and equipment at reduced rates. “If there’s anything we can do to bring some relief and identify things that are important to them, that’s what we want to do,” he said.

Blacklists long used to silence workers

On Monday, loggers and industry lobbyists, including representatives of the Maine Wood Products Association, sat together in the same hearing room at the State House and listened to testimony favoring and opposing Jackson’s legislation.

A few loggers spoke in favor of collective bargaining rights — but only after Labor Committee Chair Rep. Mike Sylvester’s (D-Portland) assurance that he will be keeping track of names should the committee hear that any of woodsmen faced retaliation after speaking up.

Jackson said that retaliation has been an effective, oft-used tactic of silencing loggers in the North Woods.

“Every time we lost a strike, they’d always fire a handful of people to make sure that there’d be somebody to point at to say, ‘If you get out of line, you’re going to be like so and so,’” he said.

For the loggers who are too young to remember the wildcat strikes and blockades carried out by the woodsmen who came before them, Jackson wonders if they, too, have now had enough to fight for change.

“Lots of people that are in the industry now don’t know any other way,” he said. “But it got so bad this year that people started talking. For a guy like me, I kind of got to wait until, you know, people want it.”

Jackson’s early organizing partner, Kelly, sees hope for the future of his industry in a loggers’ co-op.

“We always talk about being left out, not being able to stick our neck out. The only reason that is possible is because everything is done in the dark,” he said. “We never got together in one group to say, ‘Listen, why don’t we just trust one another.’ Then we can get some bargaining power and say, ‘That’s not fair.’ I do believe there’s still fair somewhere.”

(Top photo by Meredith Nutting | Creative Commons via Flickr)