With lumber sales to China surging to triple last year’s volume, B.C. wood producers are chartering their own new cargo ship to make sure their lumber makes it to market.
But the benefits of sales to Asia, now replacing the United States as the leading market for B.C. forest products, are not trickling down to forest workers or their communities.
Two of the province’s largest unions are urging government action to ensure that new prosperity helps struggling resource communities get back on their feet.
Their core demand: an end to raw log exports.
It’s an issue the labour movement is determined to put on the agenda during the next provincial election, whenever it may come.
For every cargo ship shipping lumber to China, there is at least one – more likely two or three – carrying raw logs.
Raw log exports have also tripled since 2009, with the lion’s share headed to China.
These “job boats,” as they’re called in coastal communities, are fuelling an explosion in sawmilling in China, according to a recent Vancouver Sun report.
Thousands of these mills, using basic equipment and plenty of cheap labour, are cutting B.C. and Russian logs into lumber and slicing two-by-fours into higher-value products.
The result in B.C. is a jobless recovery, said Steve Hunt, whose United Steelworkers represent the province’s unionized forest workers.
“Whether we export our timber or process it here, we have jobs in forestry and timber harvesting,” Hunt said. “But when we export [logs], we forgo five jobs in manufacturing for every logging job.”
Without provincial action to end the incentives to export raw logs, he warns, B.C. mills will struggle to get supply for domestic operations. B.C. workers will wind up buying back B.C. logs in the form of furniture and other value-added products.
“That means the hard job of encouraging more manufacturing, not just the easy job of knocking down trees and stuffing them into ships.”
Hunt’s members in the Kelowna, Cranbrook and Kamloops locals ratified a new agreement with member companies in the Interior Forest Labour Relations Association just days before West Fraser Timber, Canfor, Tolko and Western Forest Products announced the launch of their new lumber navy.
The four-year deal, retroactive to July 2009, took 22 months, a 95% strike vote and mediation to conclude. It provides meager 2% increases in each of the last two years.
For the steelworkers, it was a victory just to avoid serious contract losses.
The industry reported profits in the third quarter last year for the first time in a decade, although observers warn that a full recovery in the United States is a prerequisite to real financial health.
Lumber prices are rising and Forest Minister Pat Bell claimed in December that 20 sawmills reopened in 2010, adding 1,400 jobs to the industry payroll.
But those glimmers of hope have not reassured forest communities.
After an April round of town-hall meetings in Prince George, Castlegar, Campbell River and Kamloops, BC Government Employees’ Union (BCGEU) president Darryl Walker called for reform of the tenure system to provide for more local oversight and job creation.
A union report on the consultation, BC Forests in Crisis: a Community Call for Reform, warned that community leaders in forest communities see little recovery from the effects of 10 years of sliding markets and repeated government initiatives to overhaul, deregulate and stimulate the forest sector.
Walker estimates that 40,000 jobs have been lost and 70 sawmills closed in the last 10 years, including 1,000 public-sector jobs in forest management and environmental protection.
“Communities believed they had a right to some sort of benefit from local forests,” Walker said. “They don’t believe that’s the case right now.”
B.C.’s unions expect that concern to be front and centre when voters head to the polls.
