Canadian logging giant Irving Woodlands LLC is seeking to “blackmail” the Maine Legislature and avoid collective bargaining with independent logging contractors by halting work Monday on the more than 1 million acres it owns in northern Maine, two state lawmakers charge.
The J.D. Irving Ltd. subsidiary argued Friday that it is the only landowner affected by a 2004 state law allowing forest workers to bargain. Saying the law destroys their competitiveness in Maine, Irving officials laid off 80 workers on Monday and said as many as 300 more will go if the law is not repealed.
“We are hoping for a resolution to this,” Mary Keith, vice president of communications for the New Brunswick-based corporation, said Monday. “The global market is fiercely competitive and we must do everything we can to ensure a cost-effective wood supply — not only for our own operations in the state but also to the 20-plus Maine mills that depend on our wood supply.
“In the last year alone, wood prices paid to us by our customers in the state have fallen by up to 25 percent,” Keith added.
Sen. Troy Jackson, D-Allagash, a logger who co-sponsored the law with state Rep. John L. Martin, D-Eagle Lake, doubted legislators would back down. The law has never been enforced, as lawmakers have repeatedly suspended enforcement in response to Irving threats, they said.
“I do think that the Irving employees should go file for unemployment this week because nothing is going to happen in the immediate future,” Martin said Monday.
“I am not going to operate from threats and from blackmail,” he added. “I am not willing to sit down and talk to them unless they are willing to put their employees back to work. They were never part of this, and now they are being used.”
Jackson called Irving’s latest threat “quite a game of chicken to play with people’s lives.”
“Collective bargaining never costs you money unless you have a very bad argument,” he added.
Enacted in 2004 but suspended until June 1, the law allows loggers who own and operate their own equipment to enter into a collective bargaining agreement when one forest landowner owns, possesses or acquires economic control over more than 400,000 acres in a labor market area, Jackson said.
The law prevents the state’s largest landowners from maintaining monopolies, Jackson said, by protecting workers’ access to fair pay in markets legislators deem noncompetitive — markets where workers oppose “forest landowners who possess overwhelming market power,” according to the law.
Irving has a monopoly on 95 percent of its Maine land, company officials have said, but the company is also one of Maine’s biggest investors in forest products and its workers. Irving has made 90 percent of the total investment in tree planting in the state since 2004, planting more than 14 million trees despite owning only about 10 percent of the available forestry land in the state.
The company is planting more than 1.5 million trees this year, Keith said.
Irving Woodlands, which has a work force of about 520 people — 98 percent of them Maine residents — has invested more than $1 million in training to provide its employees and contractors with the best environmental and productivity practices and technology, Keith said.
This caused an average 29 percent increase in harvester earnings since the investment began in 2004, she said. The company has also invested more than $1 million in forest ecosystem research at the University of Maine.
Jackson said he saw no reason to comply with Irving’s latest demand. Irving Woodlands sought the one-year suspension of the law in 2008 by threatening to close the Pinkham sawmill in Nashville Plantation and cut 120 workers, then moved the mill to Canada anyway, after lawmakers complied, he said.
“They blackmailed us then and they are doing it again. As we saw last year, we can’t trust them to live up to their end of the bargain,” Jackson said in a statement. “By threatening to lay off all their full-time employees unless we meet their demands, they are pitting the hourly employees against the contractors.
“This is exactly the type of attitude that led to the original bill five years ago. If you are not willing to come to the table to negotiate for fair wages, then you can’t just pick up your ball and go home,” he added.
Keith disagreed that the collective-bargaining provisions of the law are cost-free.
“There is a significant cost to managing our operations under this punitive law that targets our company. This continued financial burden is unfair and makes our company uncompetitive. We can no longer afford to pay this price,” she said.
A spokesman for House Speaker Hannah Pingree expressed doubt Monday that any new legislation would come during this session, which is set to end June 17.
It is months beyond the deadline for new legislation without approval from the Legislative Council, the 10-member leadership of the House and Senate, so any bills would likely come from Gov. John Baldacci’s office. The governor and his staff are working with Irving to avoid the necessity for new legislation, the Pingree spokesman said.
Sandra Brawders, executive director of Professional Logging Contractors of Maine, which represents 176 independent logging companies, said she was baffled by Irving’s taking action now against the law, since most loggers are out of work this month anyway due to poor market conditions.
Under the law, the state’s Forestry Rate Proceedings Panel, which is organized under the State Board of Arbitration and Conciliation, determines reasonable rates of compensation for forest products hauling and harvesting services in a specified area of the state.
But those determinations are not made unless loggers seek them, and since the law was enacted five years ago, no such request has been made, and no rates set, Brawders said Monday.
“No one has brought any case law on this because nobody could afford to go up against Irving,” she said. “Nobody’s even talking about it. The price of wood [stinks]. Nobody’s cutting anything.
“They [Irving] are creating a drama that I don’t have an audience for,” Brawders added. “This is not how they would effect change, so I am not sure what Irving is worried about. What is there in this for them? To use this threat against Governor Baldacci at this time, there must be something else that they want. I have no idea what. This doesn’t make any sense to me.”
The law, Jackson said, grew out of draconian Irving policies that forced independent contractors working for the company into bankruptcy and a monthlong 2003 strike in Portage in which the contractors sought legal protection against the company’s methods.
Of the 66 companies that struck, 17 returned to work for Irving the next year, Jackson said.
Yet a report on the law and Irving by the Maine Attorney General’s Office showed that Irving’s domination of the land didn’t necessarily indicate a dominance of the labor market, Keith said.
Nor was “evidence of wage compensation below market rates readily apparent in the areas of high landowner concentration,” according to the report.
“We are willing investors in the forests and people of Maine. We want to continue this investment,” Keith said. “However, this investment — and the economic activity it generates — cannot be sustained by a punitive law that targets one company.
“We believe there should be one set of rules that applies to all Maine landowners.”
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