TECHNOLOGY AND LAND JOBS USE IN ¢ Canada has some of the most efficient bush and mill operations seen in any country in the world. by Kim Pollock The following is background paper which was written by National Environment and Land- use Department Director Kim Pollock in Novem- ber of last year. he I.W.A. has always worked hard for job creation within the forest sector. In the 1980s, for instance, our picket lines on the Vancouver waterfront backed up our demand for an end to the export of raw logs. Today, we are fighting for laws to limit the export of virtually unprocessed wood, such as some forms of cants. We know that without new jobs, we cannot provide opportunities in the forest industry for our children. Without new jobs, our communi- ties will stagnate. At the same time, however, we don’t advocate the creation of any or all jobs in the forest sec- tor. I'W.A. CANADA members aren’t interested in low wage, unsafe “McJobs” in fly-by-night logging shows or sawmills. Too often those kinds of operations cut corners on safety, envi- ronmental standards and workers’ pay and benefits. Those are exactly the sort of abuses our union aims to wipe out. As well, we oppose plans to eliminate good- paying forest sector jobs and substitute lower paying work in the tourism or service sectors. THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE As historian Norman Clark wrote in his excellent history of early Everett, Washington, one of the main factors that kept wages low and thwarted mill workers’ efforts to raise them was the crude level of technology and resulting low productivity in pre-First-World-War timber mills. The unendurable tension that gave rise to violent and unwinable strikes in the pre-war era “did not end because of the war. Nor did it end because industrialists learned benevolence or because labour leaders learned moderation. Tt began to recede when a new technology made individual workmanship more efficient and pro- ductive and when the capitalizations for these new machines in money and intelligence forced all but a few mills from the competition,” Clark noted. In other words, it was only with the coming of efficient new mills powered by electricity instead of steam that workers’ productivity was raised enough to allow them to raise their wages above meager subsistence. Surely no one today hungers for a return to the “golden and gruesome” days of capitalism. Fortunately, today’s advanced technology makes possible both high wages and decent working conditions in a fully competitive, highly efficient industry. Canadian sawmills, logging operations and other woodworking plants are among the most productive and com- petitive in the world; this allows Canadian workers to gain a steady and even growing share of wealth generated in the industry with- out undermining our ability to export our prod- ucts into international markets. Much has been written and said recently about the role of new technology in the forest sector. Many in the environmental movement and many academics, for instance, have claimed that technology is depleting the forest sector labour force, that forest employment is steadily shrinking and that the forest industry con- tributes a negligible share of the country’s over- all jobs or economic returns. This view is largely untrue and is not borne out by the available evidence. It typically masks the green movement’s true agenda, which is to make possible a steady ero- sion of the working forest available to the forest industry, with resulting heavy job loss. That’s why it’s important to make clear how many jobs the forest sector represents and what a major contribution it makes to our economy. Although there clearly were employment reductions in the forest sector in the two reces- sions of the early eighties and early nineties, employment levels have remained steady or even increased over the THE FOREST INDUSTRY than that paid by their Southern counters. _ The main reason for this was not differential exchange rates, but rather the B.C. mills hu; advantage in productivity per hour worked, which ranged from 40 to 80 pera higher than that for the most efficient Southern U.S. mill and was over two and a half times as high as employee output in all Southern operations. — This could hareat because B.C. Interior mills achieved a massive increase in productivity as a result of investments between about 1978 and 1984, allowing them to outperform a low-wa competitor such as the U.S. South and remain competitive even though over the same period hourly compensation jumped by 98 percent in Canadian dollar terms and a massive 60 per- cent in U.S. dollars. The relation between tech change and ene ment is therefore complex. As the I.W.A. CANADA report points out, it is particularl important to separate the effects of the capital- ist economic cycle from the effects of technol- ogy: he British Columbia Interior provides a striking example of the impact of productivity on unit production costs. These costs were kept at legals below depressed lumber prices by operating at a high rate of output per hour worked. As a result, while other regions suf- fered major cutbacks in production between 1978 and 1984, output in the B.C. Interior jumped by 18.5 percent during those years. And employment fell by just 12 percent — well below the 21 percent decline in the U.S. West. However, if the large scale modernization pro- grams...had not been carried out in the B.C. Interior, the depressed markets of the 1980s would have resulted in a much higher rate of job loss. In this sense, technological change was a prerequisite to survival.” Much of the job loss that occurred in the early eighties was thus the result of depressed markets, not new technology. While many mar- ginally efficient mills could survive in the boom markets of the late seventies, the severe reces- sion which set in during the early eighties allowed only the most efficient operations to survive, suffering the smallest relative declines in production and employment, the I.W.A. study notes. This is in contrast to the situation of the ply- wood industry during the same period. There some 4000 unionized jobs were lost not due to new technology, but rather industry’s refusal to implement new technol- past 10 years: ° According to Statis- tics Canada’s Labour Force Survey, for instance, the number of forest sector jobs increased by an average of over 2 percent per year between 1985 and 1995. Current forest sector employment is over 369,000. ° The 10-year average gain in both the wood and Although much is made of technological change as a factor of job displacement, little is said about the ways in which it has saved jobs. ogy or develop a new marketing strategy in the face of U.S. compe- tition and protection- ism. The I.W.A. actu- ally urged the industr: to adapt, a plea that feil on deaf ears. We know that real-life choice is seldom between “no tech change and no job loss” and “tech change and lose all the jobs;” often logging sectors was even higher over the same period, 3.1 and 3.2 percent per year, respec- tively. This in spite of severe employment declines in the recession of the early nineties. ° As the economy climbed out of the reces- sion, Canadian forest sector employment increased from 241,500 in 1992 to 246,800 in 1995, according to Price Waterhouse’s annual forest-sector survey. For British Columbia, as well, employment lost in the recession of the early nineties has almost all been recouped, according to figures from Price Waterhouse. This is partly the result of increased demand for lumber and other prod- ucts, as well as the implementation of the For- est Practices Code. The role of new technology in forest sector employment seems to be greatly misunder- stood. Although much is made of technological change as a factor of job displacement, little is said about the ways in which tech change has saved jobs. A 1986 study by I.W.A. CANADA’s Research Department, for instance, shows that by the mid-eighties, B.C. Interior sawmills were dramatically out-competing Southern U.S. mills, even though the B.C. mills were paying total compensation over $7 U.S. an hour higher it’s “some tech change and some job loss” or “no tech change and no jobs. When I.W.A. CANADA surveyed its members in 1986, therefore, most were concerned with gaining protection from the effects of future tech change rather than with halting its imple- mentation. I.W.A. CANADA did in fact negoti- ate a series of measures to help insulate union members from the effects of new technology, including advance notice, right to retrain and relocation allowances. In fact, the tech change provisions in I.W.A. collective agreements stand among the best in Canada. Technological change, then, can be seen to be a complex force in the forest industry, as in oth- ers. On one hand, it is true that tech change can eliminate jobs and reduce overall employ- ment levels, at least temporarily. On the other, though, tech change often allows substantial wage increases through productivity gains; tech change also makes possible retention of jobs that might be lost due to inefficiency and uncompetitiveness. Continued on next page a 14/LUMBERWORKER/DECEMBER, 1997