The Changing Timber Industry New Role For An Old Industry For A Variety Of Reasons, Forest Industry Plays Smaller Role In Region’s Economy

Independent loggers like Stan Smith are reluctant to go into some Coeur d’Alene businesses wearing their trademark work clothes anymore. People cast them as villains.

“You can feel it … they shun us,” said Smith, 42, a third-generation woodsman who has worked among the trees since he was 12. “Between big timber companies and environmentalists, they’ve turned logging into a dirty word.

“Yet I don’t think I know a single logger in favor of clearcuts.”

Smith’s experience is a dramatic turnabout in a region where sawmills and loggers started nearly every town or were central to their fabric. It’s a cultural symptom that highlights a shift that has been under way for years. This isn’t timber country anymore - retirees bring in far more income than loggers and mill workers.

The timber industry has long been one of the Inland Northwest’s economic heavyweights - and carries the political clout to prove it. Politicians and industry lobbyists preach eloquently about saving the timber economy and they fight environmentalists over the right to cut the last big logs.

Timber’s heavyweight title, meanwhile, is passe. The industry has gone from top player to minor economic contender.

It’s not that the timber industry is faltering. It’s simply being outperformed by other businesses.

These trends get lost in the rhetoric between environmentalists and industry and the “spin” both sides try to put on their positions. However, historians, forestry experts, economists and the people who actually cut the trees tell a more balanced story about the health of the Northwest timber industry.

The graying of the region

The new economic champion is retirement income. Wages from service jobs, running the gamut from health care to waiting on tourists, also are running strong.

For example, income from Social Security and government pensions grew six times faster than income from timber over the last three decades.

Take the five counties of North Idaho, sometimes cited as being the nation’s most timber dependent. In 1969, lumber and wood products provided 14 percent of the area’s personal income.

Today, despite the fact wood products wages and salaries have more than doubled, the industry accounts for less than 4 percent of North Idaho’s collective personal incomes.

Social Security and government pensions, meanwhile, have grown more than 400 percent, from $114.4 million to $500.5 million. The trend holds true for the rest of the Inland Northwest’s timber basket, stretching from northeast Washington to Western Montana.

The retirement and service-industry shift, though substantial, doesn’t produce the same feeling of economic security that sawmills and other industries do. That’s because “people don’t see that kind of employment, they look for a smokestack or a wood yard,” said Richard Haynes, an economist with the U.S. Forest Service’s research station in Portland.

Cultural losses, monetary gains

Cultural changes are more pervasive than gray hair supplanting green trees on the road to better times. Clearcuts no longer are welcome on the vistas of resource-extraction communities such as Osburn or Wallace, Idaho.

In sawmill towns such as Sandpoint, a chicken Caesar salad is becoming as common as a cheeseburger and the logger bar competes with microbrew bistros. A former Oregon timber worker moved to Coeur d’Alene and opened an espresso stand.

At a recent timber sale protest near Coeur d’Alene there were as many retirees as youthful protesters, although the latter are more often the portrait of the environmental activist.

The timber industry is undergoing an equally significant metamorphosis. Overall, the Inland Northwest has steadily harvested more trees and produced more lumber and wood products since World War II. The industry has just figured out how to do it with fewer people and in the process has relinquished its role as a prime employer.

For those whose livelihoods vanish in the change, it’s not all gloom. Some are relieved to flee the monotony of mill work, even though they figure it will take two incomes to replace their mill wages.

Small, getting smaller

Hari Heath went bust three years ago after he tried to add a small sawmill to his logging operation. Part back-to-the-lander, part constitutionalist, Heath’s livelihood now is the accidental outgrowth of a hobby - making tomahawks, primitive bows, arrows and war clubs.

His wares are beautifully crafted in his Santa, Idaho, home on a work bench framed by a picture of Rhett and Scarlet in “Gone with the Wind,” a stack of Idaho State Constitutions still in plastic wrap and a sign warning this is a “Clinton Free Zone.” Heath sells them nationally, through a catalog he produces and by going to shows.

It’s a bare living, so he’s expanding “Heathen Arms” to include giving instruction to the do-it-yourself bowmaker. But Heath doesn’t want to go back to logging.

“I don’t miss frequently crawling down into the hull of my skidder to fix it,” Heath said. “I enjoy what I’m doing.”

Where a layoff meant a better future

Kevin Smith’s departure from the timber industry took a much different turn. While Smith, 38, feels for those who lost livelihoods, he bids the timber business sweet adieu.

He was pushed out in early 1994, when Crown Pacific dumped its Spokane mill - Long Lake Lumber Co. He completed a two-year degree in real estate management this spring and is rejoining his wife, a receptionist, in the labor force. Together they will earn about as much in a year as he made after 15 years in the mills, Smith predicted.

He’s thankful.

“I was stuck. I had bills. I was making $12.50 an hour with no real qualifications,” Smith said. College wasn’t compelling and his dad worked in the mills. “I was a shoo-in. Unfortunately.”

It was dangerous, mind-numbing, body-wrenching work with no prospect for advancement. When sawblades exploded while cutting through old telephone insulators or nails in so-called farmer wood, “I’d sit and shake, I hated it so much,” Smith said.

“I never wanted to be one of the old guys in the mill,” he added. “I’m glad I don’t have to figure out which one I’m going to be.”

Worker pain, industry progress

Pain accompanies the Inland Northwest’s changing economy. In the past 18 months, the region lost more than 1,000 timber jobs, likely an underestimate since the statistics don’t thoroughly track independent loggers, truckers or two-man mills making cedar shingles.

The industry gathers great sympathy with these workers’ stories. But corporations that once employed them don’t appear to be hurting.

People measure the industry’s health in jobs, but economists consider that incomplete. “You don’t really have an industry in decline, you have an industry taking advantage of technological changes,” said Haynes, the Forest Service economist, who emphasizes he sympathizes with the people who have lost jobs.

It’s the classic story of all successful manufacturing in a free market economy: consolidate, automate and, when it comes to the most expensive element - labor - eliminate. Good news for the company bottom line, bad news for timber employment.

Most everyone expects logging and milling jobs to continue to disappear as the industry consolidates into a few megamills. But it’s also a tougher world for the survivors.

“It’s easy to move into virgin timber and make money,” said one timber corporation executive who didn’t want to be named because it’s not popular to admit that publicly. After that comes the shakeout that leaves fewer, larger mills staffed by computers. It also pushes loggers farther and farther for prized old-growth timber.

What’s left

The changing economy doesn’t necessarily mean timber jobs are replaced by minimum-wage work flipping burgers.

“You may have lost 200 jobs in the timber industry and gained 1,000 elsewhere,” explained Forest Service economist Haynes.

“There’s always the story of Uncle Joe, who lost his mill job, and can only get a security-guard job at Wal-Mart,” Haynes said. “But Uncle Joe doesn’t want to move and Uncle Joe has an eighth-grade education.

“We make too much of Wal-Mart. The reality is that a lot of trade and service jobs are like accountants and insurance salesmen.”

Retraining also doesn’t have to be futile. But it’s fraught with politics and the fact unions don’t like to retrain workers for jobs the union doesn’t represent, economists say.

The industry? While some semblance of it likely will remain, it will continue to be highly mobile, as it has since Paul Bunyan moved from New England to the Lake States and on to the Pacific Northwest. It’s basic economics, not folklore.

“The industry looks for the cheapest source of materials and moves there,” Haynes said. Hence, the Montana AFL-CIO is shipping mill hands to the plentiful plateaus of Siberia to work as consultants.

Potlatch and Weyerhaeuser continue to expand their empires to the Southeast where a tree grows to saw timber size in half the time as the Inland Northwest.

Vaagen Brothers sold its Ione, Wash., mill and shipped it to China. Boise Cascade packed up an Idaho mill and moved it to Mexico. Other companies are looking to timber plantations in Chile.

Mixed review for those left

Much of the surviving timber industry finds the changes profitable. Workers on the losing end of that equation are more ambivalent.

While independent logger Stan Smith has never found any trade he likes as much - “They didn’t pay as well and there aren’t any adrenaline rushes from near-death experiences” - he figures he will get out of the business in a few years.

A single parent of three, Smith hopes there will be enough of a timber business left for his youngest daughter to join in 10 or 15 years. But he wants her to work the woods with a college degree instead of a log skidder or a chain saw. His oldest daughter, meanwhile, studies opera at the University of Idaho.

Smith shrugs, adjusts his black “National Indian Lottery” baseball cap and turns to help his youngest with her homework. “It’s the young guys I’m worried about.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo 2 Graphics: 1. Cutting down the sawmills; 2. The changing face of income

The following fields overflowed: BYLINE = Ken Olsen Staff writer Staff writer Eric Torbenson contributed to this report.