Lumber workers are, by nature of their employment, divided into two
categories--the saw-mill hand and the logger. The former, like his
brothers in the Eastern factories, is an indoor type while the latter is
essentially a man of the open air. Both types are necessary to the
production of finished lumber, and to both union organization is an
imperative necessity.
Sawmill work is machine work--rapid, tedious and often dangerous. There is
the uninteresting repetition of the same act of motions day in and day
out. The sights, sounds and smells of the mill are never varied. The fact
that the mill is permanently located tends to keep mill workers grouped
about the place of their employment. Many of them, especially in the
shingle mills, have lost fingers or hands in feeding the lumber to the
screaming saws. It has been estimated that fully a half of these men are
married and remain settled in the mill communities. The other half,
however, are not nearly so migratory as the lumberjack. Sawmill workers
are not the "rough-necks" of the industry. They are of the more
conservative "home-guard" element and characterized by the psychology of
all factory workers.
The logger, on the other hand, (and it is with him our narrative is
chiefly concerned), is accustomed to hard and hazardous work in the open
woods. His occupation makes him of necessity migratory. The camp,
following the uncut timber from place to place, makes it impossible for
him to acquire a family and settle down. Scarcely one out of ten has ever
dared assume the responsibility of matrimony. The necessity of shipping
from a central point in going from one job to another usually forces a
migratory existence upon the lumberjack in spite of his best intentions to
live otherwise.
What Is a Casual Laborer?
The problem of the logger is that of the casual laborer in general.
Broadly speaking, there are three distinct classes of casual laborers:
First, the "harvest stiff" of the middle West who follows the ripening
crops from Kansas to the Dakotas, finding winter employment in the North,
Middle Western woods, in construction camps or on the ice fields. Then
there is the harvest worker of "the Coast" who garners the fruit, hops and
grain, and does the canning of California, Washington and Oregon, finding
out-of-season employment wherever possible. Finally there is the
Northwestern logger, whose work, unlike that of the Middle Western "jack"
is not seasonal, but who is compelled nevertheless to remain migratory. As
a rule, however, his habitat is confined, according to preference or force
of circumstances, to either the "long log" country of Western Washington
and Oregon as well as California, or to the "short log" country of Eastern
Washington and Oregon, Northern Idaho and Western Montana. Minnesota,
Michigan, and Wisconsin are in what is called the "short log" region.
[Illustration: A Logger of the Pacific Northwest
This is a type of the men who work in the "long log" region of the West
coast. His is a man's sized job, and his efforts to organize and better
the working conditions in the lumber industry have been manly efforts--and
bitterly opposed.]
As a rule the logger of the Northwest follows the woods to the exclusion
of all other employment. He is militantly a lumberjack and is inclined to
be a trifle "patriotic" and disputatious as to the relative importance of
his own particular branch of the industry. "Long loggers," for instance,
view with a suspicion of disdain the work of "short loggers" and vice
versa.
"Lumber-Jack" The Giant Killer
But the lumber-jack is a casual worker and he is the finished product of
modern capitalism. He is the perfect proletarian type--possessionless,
homeless, and rebellious. He is the reverse side of the gilded medal of
present day society. On the one side is the third generation idle
rich--arrogant and parasitical, and on the other, the actual producer,
economically helpless and denied access to the means of production unless
he "beg his lordly fellow worm to give him leave to toil," as Robert Burns
has it.
The logger of the Northwest has his faults. He is not any more perfect
than the rest of us. The years of degradation and struggle he has endured
in the woods have not failed to leave their mark upon him. But, as the
wage workers go, he is not the common but the uncommon type both as
regards physical strength and cleanliness and mental alertness. He is
generous to a fault and has all the qualities Lincoln and Whitman loved in
men.
In the first place, whether as faller, rigging man or on the "drive," his
work is muscular and out of doors. He must at all times conquer the forest
and battle with the elements. There is a tang and adventure to his labor
in the impressive solitude of the woods that gives him a steady eye, a
strong arm and a clear brain. Being constantly close to the great green
heart of Nature, he acquires the dignity and independence of the savage
rather than the passive and unresisting submission of the factory worker.
The fact that he is free from family ties also tends to make him ready for
an industrial frolic or fight at any time. In daily matching his prowess
and skill with the products of the earth he feels in a way, that the woods
"belong" to him and develops a contempt for the unseen and unknown
employers who kindly permit him to enrich them with his labor. He is
constantly reminded of the glaring absurdity of the private ownership of
natural resources. Instinctively he becomes a rebel against the injustice
and contradictions of capitalist society.
Dwarfed to ant-like insignificance by the verdant immensity around him,
the logger toils daily with ax, saw and cable. One after another forest
giants of dizzy height crash to the earth with a sound like thunder. In a
short time they are loaded on flat cars and hurried across the
stump-dotted clearing to the river, whence they are dispatched to the
noisy, ever-waiting saws at the mill. And always the logger knows in his
heart that this is not done that people may have lumber for their needs,
but rather that some overfed parasite may first add to his holy dividends.
Production for profit always strikes the logger with the full force of
objective observation. And is it any wonder, with the process of
exploitation thus naked always before his eyes, that he should have been
among the very first workers to challenge the flimsy title of the lumber
barons to the private ownership of the woods?