
          Ending the Short Stick In Mississippi's Woods
          By 
            Israel, TomTom
	       Israel and Williams, RandallRandall Williams
          Vol. 4, No. 3, 1982, pp. 16-18
          
          Pine trees are commonplace, but timber is an industry, especially
in the South where forests stretch from Houston to the Carolinas. In
Mississippi today, timber is the largest provider of manufacturing
jobs and the state's largest crop.
          The timber industry will play a key role in the next several
decades in the South. The trees are here, the giant wood products
companies are here, and a paper shortage is projected for the next
twenty-five or thirty years. The crop is constantly expanding, as
witnessed by oldtimers who drive through rural areas and point out the
cotton fields of their youth, now grown into the piney woods.
          For the harvesters of the crop, however, even those who enjoy the
work, woodcutting is one of the dirtiest, most dangerous and poorest
paying of occupations.
          There are two types of wood harvesters--pulpwooders, who cut and
haul wood to be made primarily into paper products, and loggers, whose
labor ultimately leads to the making of lumber. They can be
distinguished on the road by the way the wood is stacked on their
trucks: pulpwood is short and stacked across the truck, while logs are
long and stacked lengthwise. In Mississippi, an estimated ten thousand
people work in the woods, and about eighty percent of them are
black. However, log haulers are more likely to be white than black,
largely because cutting logs is more profitable than cutting pulpwood
and because the timber companies have allowed whites to take that
economic step up.
          About four-fifths of the wood harvesters are pulpwooders, and they
are the chief beneficiaries of the Mississippi Fair Pulpwood Scaling
and Practices Act, which was to go into effect July 1. The story of
the passage of that act and the reasons why it was necessary is worth
hearing.
          Woodcutters are paid a piece rate for each cord of wood they
sell. A cord is a volume measure of four feet by four feet by eight
feet. The pulpwooder and his crew cut the trees down, saw off the
limbs, cut them into five-foot 

lengths, load them on the truck and
haul them to a wood yard. The work is hard and dangerous: a
get-together of woodcutters where everyone has all his fingers or toes
is rare.
          An average truck load has three or four cords with a gross value to
the woodcutter of about $120. When the hauler brings the wood to the
yard, it's measured with a long yardstick. The common practice is for
the wood hauler to hold the stick against the stack of wood on his
truck, and the dealer stands back and reads the scale off the top of
the stick.
          The woodcutter can't see the scale and he isn't even told how much
wood was on his truck until it has already been unloaded, by which
time it's too late to argue. The United Woodcutters Association
estimates that woodhaulers earn about six to seven thousand dollars a
year if they work full-time, and that an average cutter loses about
fifteen hundred dollars per year to the short stick. So it has been a
real problem.
          The Woodcutters Association decided to organize a campaign around
this issue and tried for three years to get a bill passed that would
set standards for measuring-scaling--the wood at the yard. But
woodcutters are very isolated from one another. They work in remote
locations and they usually know only the other woodcutters who may be
in their family or in their church.
          They may recognize some other woodcutters by sight or may recognize
their trucks which they've seen on the road or at the woodyard, but
they don't know them. They also haul their wood to about 250 scattered
woodyards throughout the hills of Mississippi (The United Woodcutters
Association is organized in forty-two counties in Mississippi.)
          A second barrier to effective organizing is fear on the part of the
workers. The Association is not, like most unions, an organized
shop. The people who join and who speak out in favor of such things as
the fair scaling act are completely unprotected at the woodyard
against firing and harassment. Even woodcutters who simply attend
Association meetings are subject to intimidation from dealers.
          To overcome some of these barriers to organizing, the Association
started a cooperative. The woodcutters have to own and operate
chainsaws and trucks and they burn up large amounts of supplies, which
they usually get from the wood dealers for whom they work, often at
exorbitant prices.
          The system is very similar to sharecropping. The woodcutters are
considered independent contractors and are thus not usually covered by
insurance or other benefits from either the wood dealer or the big
paper companies, yet they end up in economic dependence to the wood
dealers, who function much like labor contractors.
          When a woodcutter needs a tire for his truck or a chain for his saw
or even a loan for a piece of equipment, he will go to the wood dealer
who will advance him the money and then deduct it a little at the time
from the woodcutter's pay for each cord of wood. The net effect is
that the woodcutter never gets out of debt and his already meager
take-home pay is whittled away even more. From the payment he receives
from the wood dealer, of course, the woodcutter also has to pay his
helpers, own and operate his truck and saws, pay social security and
buy insurance, if he has it.
          The cooperative was thus a very effective organizing tool. The
Association now has co-ops at forty-three different locations around
the state where the woodcutters can get their saw files and their
chain oil and a dozen other products they need to stay in
business. The woodcutters not only get lower prices but they get to
meet and get to know each other, which helps break down the problem of
isolation. And because the members of the Association are the
administrators of the co-ops, they gain confidence in working together
as a unit.
          All of this work helped in the three-year campaign to get the fair
scaling practices act, but it wasn't enough. The campaign succeeded
when the word finally got out to the landowners that they were losing
as much as the woodcutters due to the short stick, or inaccurate
measuring of the loads on the pulpwood trucks. The landowners off
whose land the wood is cut are also paid on the basis of the
measurement taken by the wood dealer at the yard. By doing a lot of
organizing among small farmers, the Association eventually got an
endorsement from the Farm Bureau, and on March 8 the Mississippi Fair
Pulpwood Scaling and Practices Act passed.
          The act requires licensing of wood dealers and establishes uniform
measurement procedures, procedures where the woodcutter can file
complaints, and third-party arbitration to settle disputes. These
procedures are important to give protection to the woodcutter who
actually files a complaint, so he won't be told the next day not 

to come back to that woodyard again.
          The next step for the Association is to organize strikes at some
wood yards. The fundamental poverty of the woodcutters is not going to
change until they are paid more. Getting an accurate measure will mean
a lot more money but the woodcutters are still paid very little for
their labor. By the time he pays all the costs of production, the
woodcutter who clears eight or nine dollars on a cord of wood is doing
very well.
          The Association put together its first strike last summer in
Fayette, Miss., where three yards were shut down for about one
month. One yard settled with a two dollars per cord raise and an
agreement to post standards on how the loads would be measured. The
second yard came through with just a raise. The third yard, which was
run by International Paper Co., shut down and moved out of town.
          In addition to more strikes and other job actions, the Association
is now campaigning for workers' compensation coverage for woodcutters;
as independent workers with the middlemen wood dealers between them
and the paper companies, they have been denied this protection for
on-the-job injuries or deaths.
          Finally, there are thousands of woodcutters in other Southern
states whose working conditions are equally as dangerous, whose pay is
equally as low, and whose isolation is equally as limiting.
          For these woodcutters, it seems, imitation of the Mississippi
example may be the first step on the road out of poverty.
          
            Tom Israel is the lead organizer for the United Wood
cutters Association. This article is adapted from his remarks at a
recent conference hosted in Montgomery by the Southern Poverty Law
Center, where Randall Williams is employed.
          
        