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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - Appendices - 6. Pre-War Conditions of the Negro Wage Earner in Selected Industries and Occupations - 4. Turpentine Farms - 5. Lumber
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logo An American Dilemma
low. On the basis of field Work and various spot studies,® Norgren estimated the normal
wage at between 90 cents and $1.25 per day; the annual wage income, because of slack
work daring the winter and during rainy days, is probably little more than $200.
Housing facilities in the camps are often extremely unsatisfactory. The commissary
system is widely used, just as on Southern plantations. Prices are kept high, and workers
easily become indebted to the employers. Not even Negroes are easy to get under such
conditions. There is a general complaint among employers that labor is scarce. Such a
situation must tempt employers to indulge in practices of peonage, and there are definite
reports to the effect that these temptations have not always been resisted. It has even
happened that workers have been induced to come to the camps under false pretenses
and then forced into contracts and debts and thereby retained as workers.
Labor is recruited for these camps by a man, usually a Negro, who makes glowing
speeches of high wages and easy hours. But soon the unsuspecting Negro youth, who
thought he was getting on a truck headed for a distant city, finds he is headed toward a
turpentine or lumber camp. Once there he gets into debt and can leave only upon threat
of a six months* chain gang sentence. For, according to the law, jumping a debt is defined
as ‘‘intent to injure and defraud.
****
The claim that the Florida peonage law was sponsored by turpentine farm interests
sounds plausible.‘^
The turpentine farm workers have no protection from any federal labor legislation,
as the turpentine industry, except for the distilleries, is considered part of agriculture.
Employers receive, for the same reason, certain benefits under the new agricultural
programs. Indirectly, the workers may have received some part of these benefits. Yet, by
and large, the gum industry is characterized by extraordinarily exploitative conditions
of work, and it has an uncertain future. The implications of the situation are especially
serious for Negroes because this industry employs mostly Negroes.
5. Lumber
Next to building construction and the iron and steel industries, lumber is the most
important of all manufacturing industries from the point of view of the number of
Negroes employed. The lumber industry proper had in 1930 almost 140,000 Negro
workers. In addition, there were about 26,000 Negro forest workers, most of whom
were registered as “lumbermen, raftsmen and woodchoppers.”*^ A large part of these
were employed by the rapidly growing Southern paper and pulp industry. In this work,
however, it is only the wood-cutting activity which is a Negro occupation. In the paper
and pulp mills themselves there were less than 8,000 Negro workers in 1930.® These
• See, for example. Work Projects Administration, Part-Time Farming in the Southeast,
Research Monograph 9 (1937), pp. 112-213.
^Arthur Raper, “Race and Class Pressures,** unpublished manuscript prepared for this
study (1940), p. 1S6.
* Arthur Raper {idem) quotes an article by Orland K. Armstrong (New York World,
November 26, 1929), according to which the man, who was president of the Florida Senate
when the peonage bill was passed, acknowledged that “the influence behind the passage of
this law was the naval stores and lumber operators of this state.’*
*U.S. Bureau of the Census, Negroes in the United States: ig2o-ig^2, pp. 337-359.
According to the 1940 figures, which are not quite comparable, there were in the South
156,000 Negro workers employed in logging, sawmills and planing mills, manufacturing
of furniture, store fixtures and miscellaneous wooden goods. (Chapter 13, Table 3.)
•U.S. Bureau of the Census, Negroes in the United States: 1920-1932, p. 348.
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