Rep. Troy Jackson represents one of Maine’s largest and most remote House districts.
AUGUSTA – For state legislator Troy Jackson, the new year began like many other days – early.
At 2:30 a.m., as New Year’s revelers stumbled home, Jackson rolled out of bed and donned his wool clothing and steel-toed boots. Then he drove an hour into the woods to start a 12-hour day at the controls of a mechanical delimber, one of the machines that has transformed the way timber is harvested in northern Maine’s industrial forest.
Jackson, 35, of Fort Kent, is at least a fifth-generation logger; the family history turns cloudy before that. But he swaps work clothes for a suit and tie when he travels to the State House to represent one of Maine’s largest and most remote House districts.
With the Legislature back in session, Jackson heads out the door for the 4-hour drive to Augusta, where he spends the workweek before returning home for the weekend with his wife and two children.
In his first term in the Legislature, he has emerged as a voice for woods workers, including many of his constituents.
Jackson helped logging and trucking contractors organize a three-week work stoppage in January at Irving Woodlands in an unsuccessful bid for higher pay.
He also has spearheaded legislation to allow the independent contractors to bargain collectively with landowners. And in the midst of it all, Jackson has signed on as a Democrat, a switch from independent.
Jackson says it has gotten tougher than ever for logging contractors, barred from unionizing, to make ends meet. And when contractors struggle, so do their employees.
Although precise figures are rare, an estimated 2,500 loggers work in the Maine woods, according to a state Department of Labor figure taking in bonded Canadians but excluding independent contractors. Annual pay is roughly $25,000 to $30,000.
But fewer young people today appear willing to accept such low-wage, often dangerous work, which could set the stage for a potential labor shortage in the woods, said Andrew Egan, a University of Maine forestry professor who has studied trends in industry employment.
Jackson, who began working in the woods at 19, helped lead a weeklong blockade along the Quebec border in 1998 to bar Canadian loggers, whom Americans blamed for driving down pay scales. A year later, he organized a protest outside the Labor Department office in Augusta.
But the protests and petitions to government leaders brought little change, prompting Jackson to run for the Legislature to see what he could accomplish from the inside.
“I thought maybe if I come down here and change people’s minds, we’d have a better chance,” he said.
Running as an independent in an overwhelmingly Democratic district, Jackson came close to defeating his Democratic opponent in 2000. Two years later, he unseated the incumbent by a comfortable margin.
Jackson aligned himself with the Democrats this year, citing their support for his collective bargaining bill. But Democratic Gov. John Baldacci, who opposes the measure, has refused to agree to withhold a veto should it become law.
“The governor is business minded,” he said. “This state talks a lot about small business people, and these men are small businessmen. But what happens here is that there’s bigger business on the other side, and no one wants to step on their toes.”
A member of the Labor Committee, Jackson has been shepherding the bill through the legislative process.
It was twice approved in the House, only to stall in the Senate. It was carried over to this year, and Jackson expects opposition from landowner lobbyists and others in the forest industry. He plans to have a contingent of loggers with him when it reaches the floor in each chamber.
Irving and the Maine Forest Products Council say the legislation is unnecessary.
“Our relationship with contractors is business to business, just as it is with the rest of the forest products industry,” said Chuck Gadzik, operations manager for Irving Woodlands.
He said his company deals with contractors, ranging from one-man operations to those that gross about $1 million. He said Irving deals with everyone on an individual basis.
“It’s one size fits all, that’s a concern of ours,” agreed Patrick Strauch of the Maine Forest Products Council, which represents logging contractors as well as mills and landowners.
To Jackson, the reality is that Irving dictates its rates to contractors, with no chance for negotiations.
As a child growing up in Allagash and St. Francis, Jackson would ride in his father’s logging truck whenever he could. Today, he said he would advise his two sons, 9 and 12, not to follow the career path he chose.
“I wouldn’t have a problem with them working in the woods if I knew they were going to make a decent living,” he said.
Hourly pay ranges from $9 to $13, depending on experience and equipment, he says. But woodcutting grinds to a three-month halt in the spring. Bad weather and equipment breakdowns also eat into loggers’ income, and few bosses provide benefits or vacations.
Jackson said the shift to mechanization, which has taken hold most strongly in the North Woods, forced contractors to acquire expensive machines that have made chain saws all but obsolete.
As a result, contractors lock themselves into huge payments to buy their equipment and are forced to run it 24 hours a day in order to pay off loans, he said.
For his part, Jackson operates a delimber owned by a contractor. He said he’s not prepared to spend $230,000 for his own machine and saddle himself to payments that might outlast its working life.
“No way I’m going to buy any equipment,” he said. “What you’re doing is buying yourself a job, and I can get that without that type of headache.”
Jackson’s desire to remain in his native St. John Valley limited his work options. He earned a degree from the University of Maine at Fort Kent but found few opportunities to apply his computer-related studies.
“I know I’m smart enough to do a lot of things, but because of where I live I chose to work in the woods and I just can’t get away from it.”
AP-ES-01-30-04 1119EST
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