Maine loggers fight to unionize the North Woods

For generations, Maine’s notoriously independent loggers have banded together in sporadic actions against the state’s largest landowners, who hold all the power in the North Woods. But those wildcat strikes never got the woodsmen any big labor victories, and many say the deck is stacked against them more than ever when it comes to issues of work and wages.

“There’s been so many things that’s been tried over the years, I think a lot of the guys in the industry are just resigned to the fact that you can’t win,” Maine Senate President Troy Jackson told Beacon. “They just keep their head down and go.”

Jackson, a fifth-generation logger from Allagash, first fell into politics in 1998 when he led a group of loggers to use their trucks to block the access roads that the major landowners used to move temporarily-hired Canadian workers, called “bonds,” and logs across the border.

Now, he is trying a different tack. He wants to unionize the North Woods by giving loggers and truckers the ability to legally meet and try to negotiate their tonnage rates and costs.

Read more: https://mainebeacon.com/maine-loggers-fight-to-unionize-the-north-woods/