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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 - 5. Lumber
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1092 An American Dilemma
to utilize stands of timber which otherwise would have been economically Inaccessible.
Still, the regional differential in this regard constitutes a constant threat to the job
opportunities for Negroes. It is hard to se^ how an equalization of labor conditions could
fail to encourage such technological changes as would curtail employment in the South.®
The insecurity of the individual worker is made still greater because of the loose
structure of the Southern lumber industry. A large part of the production comes from
small, marginal mills with a high bankruptcy rate. They employ a somewhat greater
proportion of Negroes than do the large mills, partly because they have to depend on
cheap labor, but also because they cannot always aflFord to segregate white and Negro
workers in the mill towns.’* These conditions contribute to the extremely high labor
turnover; the separation rate in 1934 was as high as 88 per cent.® The rapid labor turn-
over must also be seen in conjunction with the fact that the number of working days
per year ranges around 200 days, according to a survey for 1939.*’ The lumber industry
is really nothing but an outgrowth of agriculture. Labor flows continually back and forth
between these two industries.
The wage structure has long been characterized by a great differential between
skilled workers, such as sawyers, who are predominantly white, and unskilled laborers,
most of whom, in the South, are Negroes. Various studies quoted by Norgren and
Associates indicate that, in the South, sawyers (head, band) during the ’twenties and
early ’thirties, earned more than three times and sometimes almost four times as much
per hour, on the average, as did laborers. In the Far West, on the other hand, sawyers
earned somewhat more than twice the average wage of laborers.® The wage level,
further, has been particularly low and unstable in the South. The average hourly earn-
ings for all workers in Southern logging camps and sawmills, according to certain
sample studies, seem to have decreased from roughly 30 cents in 1928 to 18 cents in
1932. It was about twice as high in the Northwest in 1928, and the regional differential
was even greater in 1 93 2 in that the relative decrease was more pronounced in the
South than in the Northwest.*
The Wages and Hours Law, In conjunction with the business recovery, had brought
about a great improvement by 1 939-1 940. The whole wage structure in the Southern
lumber mills seems to have become somewhat more concentrated; sawyers (head, band)
earned “only” about two-and-a-half times more than the low wage labor groups.®^ Even
* See Work Progress Administration, National Research Project, “Mechanization in
Lumber” (March, 1940), Report No. M-5, pp. 79-93.
**
Norgren and Associates, of, cit,^ Part i, pp. 21-26 and 69.
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