For more than a decade, the Eugene-based Hoedads and some thirteen affiliates of the Northwest Forest Workers Association (NWFWA) have offered a working model of on-the-job democracy in action. At their height, the Hoedads were the Northwest’s largest worker-owned business, with 325 members controlling a two-million- dollar-per-year company. Products of the idealism of the ’60s and ’70s, they rose to impressive economic and political strength, only to be dashed against the recessionary shoals of the ’80s. Eight NWFWA groups have perished. Others have been forced to retrench. By Bill London With David Milholland Photos and Drawings by Forestworkers Today, NWFWA Executive Director Gerry Mackie is angry, and his language vivid, as he describes the despair of the last few years, when most of NWFWA’s member co-ops dissolved, and three- quarters of the forestworkers — many of them his friends — lost their jobs. “We've been held down in an alley and choked to death, or almost to death,” he summarizes, sitting'in his cramped Eugene office, chainsmoking and twisting paper clips unmercifully. Many factors have contributed to the forestworkers’ malaise: the economic downturn, a government-forced reorganization, unfair competition, and divisions and squabbles within the co-ops themselves. Most important has been the economic recession of the early 1980s, a severe depression for the Northwest timber industry. By 19.8.3, the reforestation market had plummeted to 40 percent of normal, with increased competition for the jobs remaining, as unemployed loggers and other laborers crowded into the marketplace. Bid prices, in real dollar terms, fell to half of what they had been four years earlier. Then co-ops and private contractors alike, unwilling or unable to bid low enough, were forced into dissolution. Stable, fully financed co-ops with long histories of proven ability and sound management folded. Both Homegrown, a seven-year-old business and the largest private employer in Tiller, Oregon; and the Marmots, a 10-year-old Seattle co-op, failed. 1984 may not be a substantially better year, but Mackie is cautiously optimistic. He predicts that all the co-ops that survived 1983 will be able to continue operations. “Everyone has cut their costs and everyone is dedicated to keeping their jobs and keeping alive the co-op idea.” A Growth Industry Emerges T he Pacific Northwest, the last J. bastion of Old Growth timber in the lower 48, was so heavily cut through the mid-century that everyone involved could see the end of it all. Replanting had been haphazard, and no one was quite sure if there would be any marketable trees in fifty years. The industry, which had cut an immense swath across the continent, was poised to move on once again. Yet the cost of forest land, and the value of the remaining trees was increasing. For the government agencies, like the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the principle of sustained yield — guaranteeing that timber would not be overcut and that there would be forests in perpetuity — became their congressionally mandated foundation. Some of the large private timber companies joined the federal agencies in massive reforestation efforts. Treeplanting suddenly boomed. Foresters had experimented with treeplanting for years. The science of treegrowing (silviculture) evolved into a college-trained profession, and the earlier methods of dropping seeds from airplanes or allowing natural reseeding to occur were not proving good enough. The best way to ensure a new crop of trees was to plant young nursery seedlings in the site. But that is, in itself, an incredibly difficult job. Trees are planted in the wet seasons for the sake of their survival, which is no help to the treeplanter who must then fight the rain, sleet, snow and, of course, mud common to that time of year. Trees are generally planted in remote mountainous areas, very distant from some of the common pleasant touches of civilization, like hot showers and dry socks. The work itself is physically demanding. Planters outfitted in bulky rain gear with a minimum of 40 pounds of seedlings in waistbelt bags and carrying the heavy planting tool known as a hoedad, climb up and down steep and rocky slopes and over, under and around all • the logs, roots and branches on that hill. At intervals of every 1 hese new forestworkers were very different. They were energetic and responsible men and women, who shared work equally and made their own decisions, without bosses. They were dedicated to the task of helping the trees grow. ten feet or so, the planter jams the hoedad into the ground, opens a hole in the earth and drops in a tree. That is repeated hundreds of times daily on huge clearcuts that seem to grow larger, not smaller, with every passing day. The foresters were having some difficulty locating workers willing and able to do that job well. They usually relied on contractors who brought in crews of transient laborers, winos, undocumented workers, and people found hitchhiking along the road to the worksite. Predictably, such workers often left soon after they arrived and, while they were on the job, took no interest in their task or in the survival of the trees entrusted to them. Heirs to the Wobblies 1■ 7 1_arly in the 1970s, young, impov- erished counter-culturalists were looking for a “clean” way of making a living, all while allowing them to do something healthful and ecologically positive. An ideal business would allow democratic management, be labor intensive and require a very low capital outlay. The match with the reforestation industry was made in heaven. These new fprestworkers were very different. They were energetic and responsible men and women, who shared the work equally and made their own decisions, without bosses. The first crews were known by colorful names like the Ents, Marmots and Hoedads. Their work camps were curious amalgams of tipis and yurts, old schoolbuses and tents. They appeared to enjoy the hard work, and were dedicated to the task of helping the trees grow. Motives among the workers varied. To some, it was a job, well paid and enjoyable. To others, it was a chance to control their own lives, to live comfortably apart from the capitalist system, and even to form a vanguard or an example for a major reorganization, revolutionary in scope, of regional institutions. Whatever their perspective, the forestworkers formed a unique and positive
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