2005 has been a tough year for northcoast timber workers. PL's Fortuna mill closed June 30, laying off 100 people, in the wake of more than 70 mill worker layoffs the previous year. The Carlotta mill (the "old growth mill") closed 11 months earlier. In August, a third of PL's remaining workforce was laid off. These employees were many of PL's scientific staff, who are supposed to ensure the logging operation's compliance with government and environmental regulations. Over the past several years, PL/ScoPac has been moving toward employing its woods crews--tree fallers and haulers--as contract workers, yielding savings to the company in benefits and pension costs.
In 1984, a year before the take-over, there were 900 people employed locally by PL. In the first 6 years after the Maxxam take-over, PL employed 1,200-1,300 people; about 80% of these jobs were involved in cutting or milling old growth. There were 1,600 workers employed by PL in 2000; there are about 800 now.
The Kaiser Aluminum Example
As a counter to the scare tactics perpetrated in recent months by Maxxam's PL about bankruptcy and accompanying chaos, we take a look at another Maxxam subsidiary that went bankrupt--Kaiser Aluminum. While the cost of bankruptcy to the workers and communities was heavy, a key player in the corporate reorganization, David Foster, director of District 11 of the international Steelworkers union, sees light at the end of the tunnel. He says, "Although bankruptcy was a painful antidote to Charles Hurwitz, when Kaiser Aluminum Company emerges from the bankruptcy court-imposed reorganization later this year, it will be free of Hurwitz and Maxxam management, and free of the debt he loaded on the company, presenting the opportunity for a sustainable business plan to be developed."
Without a union to advocate for them, timber workers have a voice of low volume, and have been as subject to the divide and conquer tactics of the corporation as the environmentalists.
But the same forces that erode economic sustainability and a stable jobs base--profit motive and concentrated corporate power--also erode ecological sustainability.
When Headwaters Forest advocates were working to get Dan Hamburg's Headwaters Forest Act of 1994 passed to protect through acquisition 44,000 acres of redwood forest, Earth First! and labor activist Judi Bari gathered a group of millworkers and loggers employed or formerly employed by Pacific Lumber, Simpson, and L-P. This group proposed a similar formula as was employed when land was taken out of the timber base to create Redwood National Park (RNP).
When Redwood National Park (RNP) was created in the 1970s, the loggers and millworkers still had unions to represent them. They were able to negotiate an agreement whereby they were paid 2/3 of their wages for the next 6 years, to give them a chance to retrain or relocate and find a new job.
Judi's vision and the RNP plan are not on the table in current discussions, but it is always important to put models forward that illustrate that ecological preservation does not have to come at the cost of jobs or local economies.
