How Oregon’s forestry workforce has evolved over 50 years

Note: This is part of a series on the workers performing labor-intensive forestry. That’s all the work in this country’s forests that isn’t logging — vital services like reforestation and fuel treatment. In the next story, we’ll look closer at guest workers in the forestry industry and Jackson County’s role as national hub for contractors hiring this labor.

Since the 1970s, billions of dollars in federal contracts have gone to forestry work like replanting trees or fuels reduction. Oregon has long been a center for businesses getting those contracts. But that industry looked a lot different 50 years ago.

On a December morning the hills above Ashland, like many forests in the West, are buzzing with the sound of chainsaws.

Workers with the nonprofit Lomakatsi Restoration Project are busy working to protect the valley from wildfire. Crews are clearing understory, reducing fuel that can feed fire.

This kind of work is officially called labor-intensive forestry and includes all the backbreaking toil that isn’t logging, from tree thinning to reforestation. Officials and environmental experts say these projects are crucial for wildfire prevention and forest health. There are billions in federal contracts to prove it.

But while Oregon has long been a center for these jobs, the industry has changed dramatically over time. And it all started back in the 1970s. Richard Nixon was president. The Vietnam War was raging. The country was still mourning the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. And Jerry Rust, in his 20s, was restless.

“We were looking for an alternative to working for corporate America,” says Rust.

Thanks to the 1972 Oregon Forest Practices Act, Rust found that alternative. The law required land clear cut by loggers to be replanted, a win for early environmentalists. But tree planting takes workers — a lot of workers. Luckily, the nation was teeming with restless young people like Rust, back-to-the-landers looking to escape urban centers.

“What we had were a bunch of refugees from the East Coast and California, swarming into Eugene who’d never worked a lick in their life,” says Rust.

He helped found Hoedads Inc., named after the kind of shovel they used. It was a large worker cooperative created in the countercultural spirit of the times. Rust led his forest cadre into the backcountry, replanting the barren mountain sides left by timber companies.

“That was one of the joys I had, teaching untrained workers and watching them bend their backs and sweat and come out of there dirty and just high as a kite,” says Rust.

The Hoedads were eventually performing a good portion of tree planting in the country, getting millions in federal contracts with hundreds of workers organized into crews. No one was getting rich, Rust says, but the pay could be decent depending on the contract. If anything, it was democratic, he explains. Workers decided how the contract money was split, divided equally or doled out per tree planted.

“My crew was Red Star. We were the best crew. Sorry, we were,” says former Hoedads president Greg Nagle. “We were a lot more collective. We were not Marxists. We were social democrats. The Marxists were on the Cheap Thrills crew.”

Each crew was a little different, he says, with their own customs and culture. There was even an all-lesbian group named Full Moon Rising. And while not everyone was an activist, most had a sense of purpose besides a paycheck.

“Tree planting, it’s hard. You weed out the flakes very quickly,” says Nagle. “We like to say we brought out the better side of people.”

The Hoedads utilized some of their collective labor power, fighting against pesticide use and helping elect Jerry Rust, the Hoedads founder, to Lane County’s Board of Commissioners in 1980.

But soon into that decade, the Hoedads' decline began. According to former members, there were multiple reasons. First, Hoedads were competing more with traditionally-structured businesses that employed migrant labor, including undocumented workers.

“By 1980, we were up against contractors running illegals. You can’t compete. They outwork almost any Anglo crew,” says Nagle.

Migrant workers from Latin America moved from picking crops into forestry. Businesses could pay them less. Contractors also lobbied against the worker-cooperative model.

“They saw that we had a huge competitive advantage because we weren’t paying workers’ comp. And they were right,” says Nagle.

Hoedads had to start paying worker’s compensation. That made their structure more expensive.

“If you have to think about factors, some were potentially regulatory,” says Brinda Sarathy, a professor at University of Washington, Bothell, and author of the book Pineros which explores the industry. “But then also, the workforce itself is aging out of it…. They move on from being idealistic to maybe more realistic.”

Hoedads drifted away, got degrees and started families. Greg Nagle lasted until the 90s before he left for his Ph.D.

“There’s this dramatic shift from the 1970s to the early 80s in terms of who constitutes the tree planting workforce,” says Sarathy.

Anglos were no longer the majority of tree-planting labor, explains Sarathy. And by the mid-90s, the Hoedads experiment was over. The industry is now made up of contractors who largely rely on guest workers from Latin America. The kind of work has also shifted from tree planting to include services like fuels reduction for wildfire prevention.

There’s no worker cooperatives like the Hoedads left in the industry. Although Lomakatsi, the crews doing work above Ashland, is somewhat carrying the torch. The nonprofit parters with federal agencies, tribes and contractors on forest and watershed restoration.

“Their intention was [to] pay workers well, do good-quality work, take care of the people,” says Lomakatsi founder Marko Bey. “We’re more aligned philosophically with our elders in the Hoedads then the service-contract model.”

Still, Bey says his organization is different than the Hoedads; Lomakatsi isn’t a worker cooperative. And he’s clear that there’s good contractors in the industry. “There’s a lot of shades of gray in this stuff,” says Bey.

But he says their focus on social equity, worker empowerment and social justice puts them in a different category than forestry businesses.

Braulio Maya Cortes, a crew manager at Lomakatsi, moved to the Rogue Valley from Mexico in the ’90s. He says when he worked for contractors, he wouldn’t get paid for travel time to project sites around the region. And when he arrived, sometimes his crew would only work a few days out of the week.

“They might be paying you $20 an hour. But if you do the math, you’re only getting paid like $7,” says Cortes.

At Lomakatsi he has a salary, paid time off and benefits. He’s been able to buy a house and raise a family.

Meanwhile, Hoedads founder Jerry Rust doesn’t hold it against the workers who took his cooperative’s place in the industry.

“I don’t begrudge labor coming from outside that wants to do this kind of work,” says Rust.

Although he says there’s still space for the Hoedads model.

“I would say there’s nothing stopping a motivated, youngish crew from getting together, getting trained and figuring it out,” he says.

Whether or not that happens, there’s a lot of work left to do. The National Forest Service has a plan to treat 20 million acres to reduce the severity of wildfires in the coming decade. That will take workers — a lot of workers.

This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.

This republished story is part of OPB’s broader effort to ensure that everyone in our region has access to quality journalism that informs, entertains and enriches their lives. To learn more, visit opb.org/partnerships.