“In its heyday,” says IWA Local 1-80 president
Bill Routley, “our local had about 4,000 members. Now, we’re
down to around 3,000, and about one-third of those are outside the forest
industry.” Routley has an old photograph in his office showing the
large numbers of workers in a typical logging crew in 1937. He says fewer
workers are needed to do the same jobs today because of technological
changes that have included “everything from hand-falling to power
saw to, now, feller-bunchers — high-tech machines that go through
like a lawn mower.”
Routley says because there’s a lot of company-owned forested land
on southern Vancouver Island, as opposed to government-regulated Crown
land, his local probably sees more raw-log exports than others. “You’ve
got major companies with private land, like TimberWest and Weyerhauser,
who are exporting some of the best fibre in B.C. The problem is, you’re
losing all the value-added, and even manufacturing and sawmill jobs, that
are attached to that fibre.”
Over one-half of all trees that have been cut down in B.C. were cut in
the last two decades, but one-third of the forestry jobs have disappeared.
The industry now employs fewer people per cubic metre of wood than in
the past. In 1961, there were two jobs per 1,000 cubic metres of wood
produced. By 1991, the number had dropped to .88 jobs, despite a 57-per-cent
increase in volume.
In a report for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, analyst Dale
Marshall says, “The province should be moving in the opposite direction
by giving forest companies incentives to produce more value-added products
in exchange for access to our public forests. It should also be diversifying
forest tenures to include communities and First Nations, who are often
more willing than transnationals to operate in an environmentally sensitive
way and make the most of a renewable, but finite, resource.”
The Youbou TimberLess Society is hoping to get a community
forest licence through the B.C. government’s Forest Revitalization
Plan and not only get some of their own members back to work, but create
jobs for others as well. Meanwhile, they are waiting to tangle with the
same government in court over the missing clause that allowed their mill
to be closed. They live with the impact of the error every day.
Rayner was among the workers who set up blockades after the mill closed
to prevent it from being dismantled, but TimberWest won an injunction
to clear the road. A crane was later brought in to demolish what was left
of their old worksite. “I personally think that old mill sites like
Youbou are sacred ground,” says Rayner, wistfully. “Anybody
touches that, people get upset. There were a lot of lives brought up in
there. Generation after generation, just gone.”
When YTS board members hold their monthly breakfast meetings at Cowichan
Bay’s Riverside Hotel, they can look out the restaurant windows
and see truckload after truckload of logs rumble past on their way to
Crofton or Ladysmith. From there, the logs will be shipped in large “booms”
to mills in Washington and Oregon. All that remains of the nearby Youbou
Sawmill, after 75 years in operation, is an empty lot.
Carole Pearson is a Victoria-area writer who specializes in stories about labour, human rights and the environment. A regular contributor to Our Times, her last feature article appeared in Our Times’s 2004 women’s issue, and was called “Woman at Work: B.C.’s First Female Plumber.”
The town of Youbou was named after the sawmill’s original owners, Yount and Bouton. For more information about the Youbou TimberLess Society, visit their website: www.savebcjobs.ca. To read the complete report by Dale Marshall, called “Down the Value Chain: The Politics and Economics of Raw Log Exports,” check out the publications catalogue at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives website: www.policyalternatives.ca.
This article was first published in Our Times, Canada’s independent labour magazine. It is posted here with the permission of the author. For more information about Our Times, or to subscribe, visit www.ourtimes.ca or call 1-800-648-6131.
| back to News Archive |