The chapter titled “Getting By” in Robert Leo Heilman’s Book Overstory: Zero begins with an excerpt from a Development Report by a timber logging company in Oregon:
“While the 1979-1985 years were disappointing for wood products manufacturuers and workers alike, the net result may well have been a blessing in disguise for the survival and long-term health of the industry. Hundreds of inefficient sawmill, veneer, and plywood plants have been shut down. Others have been modernized and streamlined to achieve maximum return per unit of product. New products have been developed which require lower labor costs, cheaper raw materials, and results in a better value to end-user. The net effect is a leaner, more productive and cost-effective industry. One of the principle means of reducing costs, of course, is to lower wage rates.” ~ Development Report and Plan, CCD Business Development Corp. Roseburg, Oregon, July 1986
The author goes on to tell about his experience keeping his family alive in rural Oregon timber country during the economic decline of that period. At one point, the author is having a conversation with another dad while their kids played.
“My dad told me the other night that there’s a plan for this area,” he said as we passed the bottle back and forth. His father was an accountant and local business consultant. “He says the mills are going to stay shut until everyone who can afford to move leaves. The mills are all automating and whoever’s left will be the people who can’t go anywhere else and they’ll work for cheap […] I don’t mean to say that this recession’s all been rigged. They’re just taking advantage of it is all. They owners are all going to use it to get people to work cheap. Once everybody gets hungry enough, we’ll all take pay cuts just to go back to work. They’re talking about ‘cost effectiveness’ and ‘competitive wages’ and like that.”
The author surmises:
“There was an inescapable logic to what he was saying, almost like an algebraic equation: Hungry people work cheap; people who work cheap go hungry.”
The author gets by by purchasing a milk cow. He trades the raw milk for eggs and a little cash from the neighbors and they keep each other fed for a while. He notes that everything they did was illegal– they sold raw milk without permits, drove their cars without insurance, didn’t report odd job income, ate poached venison.
“When the unemployment checks ran out, our little towns started to empty.” Eventually, too many neighbors moved off to Texas or some other place to justify the feed cost and Robert had to sell the cow.
“By the fall of 1985, there weren’t enough of my friends still living in the valley to cover the cost of feeding my cow. I sold her and her calf at auction and waited for the trickle-down.
It was a long time coming, that trickle-down. Ten years later and we’re still waiting for it. The mills and businesses and government agencies recovered, but the recovery never arrived for the people who live here. For the first time in our country’s boom-or-bust economic history, business boomed while people stayed busted.”
Something spectacularly odd had happened to the timber town by 1985. In defiance of economic sense, the businesses churned back to life but the lives of the people left to work the mill towns were never the same.
“It was an odd sort of recovery. Employment rates, timber harvest levels, and emergency food use rose. The cost of cutting, hauling, and milling a million board feet of timber dropped and so did the wages and per capita income. Timber harvest levels of Douglas County were 400 million board feet higher in 1986 than in 1978 but produced $55 million less in wages. While the timber industry has become “leaner, more productive and cost-effective,” the people have simply become leaner.”