Strong Winds and Widow Makers by Steven C. Beda

Author:Steven C. Beda [Steven C. Beda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2022-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

The Changing Timber Industry

Standing nearby any Northwest sawmill at the dawn of the 1970s, it would've been difficult to tell that economic hard times lay in timber country's immediate future. There, just beyond the chain-link fence of the mill gate, young men, many still in high school, lined up looking for work. Few of them carried resumes because few had any formal work experience. The only thing most knew about the inner workings of a mill came from stories told to them by their fathers and grandfathers. But that didn't matter much to the company officials doing the hiring. Applicants were simply looked up and down, and as long as they were reasonably well put together and appeared to possess the willingness to punch in every day roughly on time, they were given high-paying union jobs, complete with full benefits, on the spot.

The reasons why had everything to do with what was happening at the shipping docks of those mills, where steady processions of trucks and railway cars, overflowing with freshly milled lumber, departed for any one of the Northwest's ports, where white-hatted longshoremen would then tightly pack it into the hulls of ships, bound for the opposite side of the Pacific Ocean. Starting in the early 1960s, cities and industries across Asia and Japan, in particular, began to rapidly expand. Factories, apartment buildings, research complexes, and new subdivisions sprang up nearly overnight as Asian policy makers and planners turned the corner on the economic lethargy of the post–World War II era and moved their countries into the new era of postwar prosperity. The leaders of Asian countries may have hoped to build an economic and industrial system that could compete with the global superpowers of the West, but they relied on solid American lumber to do so. Softwood lumber producers in the United States went from exporting roughly 210 million board feet in 1960 to exporting more than 2,316 million board feet in 1969, the bulk of which (roughly 2,000 million board feet) went to Japan. What was good for urban planners in Asia was equally good for organized labor in the Northwest. The overwhelming majority of young workers who entered mills and logging operations during the export boom signed union cards, and by 1970 the IWA had more than 117,000 members across the United States and Canada.4

Those young workers had every reason to expect a future of steady work, high pay, and union protections, because that's what their fathers had. What few realized was that as they crossed over the gates of the mill for the first time, they were crossing over into a new economic world, one that was fundamentally different from their fathers’. Across the developed world, corporations and states were abandoning an economy rooted in production and turning their backs on the implicit social contract they had with workers. Since roughly the 1940s, the global economy had been anchored in the production of consumer goods. Corporations turned out billions of automobiles, home appliances, and electronics and, in the process, turned record profits.

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