"out on 101" "high times for the stiffs" VL.5

[Terrance]

The big trees are falling, and us lumberjacks,
With high power saw, and with double blade axe;
It's fast diesel cats that's a bringing her down,
'Cause Lumber is King in a Lumbering town.

--Woody Guthrie

WORK. ROADS. TREES. 

Mason and Dixon need working men to cut trees. To cut their line. 

When you cut trees you build roads. If you cut trees on government land
and you build roads on government land, who does the WORK? Who pays the
WORKERS? In other words, who are the loggers and road crew working for? 

US 101 is perhaps the most historic highway in California. It follows
the route the Spanish explorer Juan Gaspar de Portola followed in 1769,
which later became El Camino Real, the King's Highway. This historic
road connected the 21 missions of California and served as the main
north/south road in California until the 1920s. North of San Francisco
it is known as the "Redwood Highway," which is considered by many to be
the most scenic road in California. At one time its route followed the
famous Avenue of the Giants, which goes by the tallest trees in the
world located in the Redwood
State and National Parks. 

The largest exporter of raw logs in the U.S. is Weyerhaeuser. W sells 25
percent of its harvest overseas, with Japan as the biggest customer.

W, like other timber firms in the Northwest, has been closing sawmills,
plywood
mills, and veneer mills throughout the region for over twenty years. In
Oregon alone, 90 mills were closed in the 1980's  In the Pacific
Northwest as a whole, the number was over 200.  The export of raw logs, 
represents the export of jobs. Getting one million board feet of timber
to the export docks employs 4 workers domestically, while Japan employs
60 to 80 people making finished goods with the same material. In
Washington state, every million board feet shipped overseas takes at
least seven direct jobs and 14 more indirect jobs with it.

So, how come the road crew, the loggers, the mill workers, didn't get
together so that they could all keep their jobs? High times for the
stiffs in the woods are low times for the mill workers? How's that WORK?