Chain Saw Reaction

A bill aimed at keeping Canadian loggers out of the Maine woods isn’t likely to work and could put American jobs at risk. It also puts the Maine Legislature at odds with the state’s congressional delegation.

Because of heightened security concerns last year, the U.S. Department of Labor for the first time began enforcing a cap on the number of foreign workers allowed into the country under the H-2B visa program. Many Maine businesses, including the timber industry, were shut out.

At the behest of these businesses, Maine’s senators and congressmen successfully sought passage of a provision that allowed foreign workers who had previously worked in the United States to return this year without being counted against the cap.

Now, the Maine Legislature is dangerously close to passing a bill, LD 730, that seeks to keep out many of the very workers the bipartisan delegation had worked to allow in. LD 730 would require an employer who hires foreign workers under the H-2B program to provide proof of ownership of any equipment used by that worker. The aim is to stop Canadian forestry equipment and the Canadian loggers who operate it from coming into Maine and taking work away from local loggers, says its sponsor, Rep. Troy Jackson, a Fort Kent Democrat and a logger. It would exempt equipment for which a federal prevailing wage has been set, something the U.S. Department of Labor has failed to do for modern machinery.

While Rep. Jackson’s desire to create more opportunities for American loggers is laudable, this bill does not go about it in the right way. Any enterprising contractor or mill desperate for wood will simply go around it. An American contractor, for example, could buy the equipment from a Canadian and lease it back to him.

Worse, the premise that American loggers are losing work to their Canadian counterparts has yet to be proven. Last spring, contractors – who pull together crews of harvesters and haulers to ensure a set amount of wood gets to a mill – were forced to operate without H-2B workers. To attract more American workers, wages were substantially increased. Few showed up and the volume of wood that was harvested last year was dangerously low.

Americans jobs were lost as a result. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, one Maine contractor employed 36 men: 16 Americans, five Canadians with green cards and 15 Canadian H-2B workers. Without the last, he was able to form only one crew. He lost three contracts and let five Americans go. His harvest declined from 34,000 tons to 18,000 tons.

The smaller harvest affected Maine’s mills in two ways: they paid more for wood and got less of it. Higher prices were good for loggers and contractors who made more money but they could be bad in the end as a mill’s corporate parents look for cheaper places to make paper. A wood shortage forced one Maine sawmill to lay off one shift of workers and another had sporadic shutdowns, costing American workers money.

“If Canadians don’t put wood on the ground, this crane won’t put wood on the trucks,” Maine crane operator Mike Staples told the Journal. “If our drivers don’t have wood to haul, the mills are going to starve. If the mills starve, they won’t be making lumber and paper. They’ll be laying people off. That’s what you call a chain reaction.”

A reaction the Legislature should not encourage.