Common ground

In the spirit of Seattle, Maine environmental and labor activists are joining forces

By Lance Tapley

This fall the head of the Maine AFL-CIO bailed out of jail some of the state’s most radical environmentalists. They had been charged with criminal trespassing and burglary, a felony. They had been arrested at a protest in which they had faced down a cop pointing a gun at them.

It makes you wonder if all that post-Seattle talk about a union-environmentalist coalition against corporate power is more than just far-out left-wing thinking. According to some observers, a meeting of minds may be taking place, although what it will lead to is uncertain.

“It was a personal decision,” said Ed Gorham, the labor federation president, of his putting up bail for the five women and men involved in an October 2 sit-in at the Hallowell office of the state labor department’s bureau of labor standards. The bureau regulates the employment of migrant and other low-wage workers in Maine. Gorham said he saw such nonviolent protests as being “in the finest tradition of Henry David Thoreau. These things bring the issues into focus.”

The issues the protestors wanted to focus attention on were both labor-oriented and environmental. The protestors alleged that the King administration was doing nothing about Canadians in northern Maine taking American loggers’ jobs. And, according to the protestors, these Canadians were employed by the multinational paper companies and other big landowners to clear-cut and over-cut the forest. A depleted forest would result in the ultimate theft of jobs from both Americans and Canadians, they said.

Another issue was the protestors’ claim that the state allowed (often illegal) migrant workers in southern Maine to work and live in exploited conditions, including bad environmental conditions. A minor claim was that the labor department’s “hotline” for people to report abusive work practices was a joke — they said it wasn’t staffed. And they protested Gov. King’s opposition to a higher minimum wage.

Those taken into custody were Jim Freeman, 51, of Verona Island, one of the state’s most arrested and committed environmental activists and a radical Earth First!-er; Will Neils, 24, of Appleton, former co-chair of the state’s Green Party and a veteran of last year’s Seattle anti-World Trade Organization protests; Laura Childs, 25, of Belgrade; Willa Rippberger, 24, of Carlsbad, California; and Jennifer Beatty, 21, of Minneapolis.

The group had entered the office around 6 a.m. after a janitor opened the building. They barricaded themselves in the bureau director’s inner office. Twenty people in a support group gathered outside, including novelist Carolyn Chute of Parsonsfield and members of her anti-corporate-power Second Maine Militia; Westbrook-based Stephen Perry of the New England Regional Council of Carpenters, a unit of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America; and José Soto, director of the Maine Rural Workers Coalition in Lewiston, a foundation-funded organization that tries to improve the working and living conditions of migrants.

The first cop on the scene had confronted the protestors with gun drawn. “The gun concerned us a great deal,” Will Neils recalled. “It was pointed at my head.” But the demonstrators convinced the Hallowell policeman to put away his pistol, and after combined local, county, and state forces kicked in the inner door they led the activists off to the Kennebec County jail.

The burglary charge was highly unusual for a political protest — and punishable by up to five years in prison. It had come about because of “a missing file on the logging situation that was taking place in Northern Maine,” according to the police report. However, Hallowell police chief Rodney Myrick later admitted he couldn’t prove the protestors had taken any files. Kennebec County District Attorney David Crook recently said he would drop the burglary charge. “Who knows? As a Democrat, I might even agree with them,” he mused about the activists.

Common ground on the issues

Environmentalists and labor activists might at first seem unlikely partners. Don’t environmentalists want to shut down polluting factories and preserve the forest? Aren’t workers interested in keeping their factory or forest jobs whatever the consequences? Aren’t environmentalists middle-class and elitist? Aren’t union people uneducated and parochial?

Well, those are the clichés.

But environmentalists such as protestors Jim Freeman and Will Neils don’t fit the clichés. Both are from the working class. Freeman is a carpenter and Neils lately has been doing roofing work. Neither has a college degree. They represent the populist — and generally more radical — wing of the environmental movement, the same group that brought us the Seattle protests.

The labor organizers supporting Freeman and Neils don’t fit the clichés either. Steve Perry, 54, employed by the carpenters’ union for 16 years, is college-educated and active in the state’s Sierra Club. José Soto, 49, a Puerto Rican, also is college-educated. And the AFL-CIO’s Ed Gorham, 56, a University of Maine graduate who lives in Randolph, had the broadening and idealistic experience of being a Peace Corps volunteer in India in the 1960s.

“We are for a well-managed forest as opposed to migrants from Canada coming in and just raping the forest,” said Perry, summing up the Canadian logger controversy. “We’re for sustainable forestry.” As Ed Gorham put it: “There is a recognition among a number of folks that the corporations that abuse the forest tend to be those that exploit the workers.” Perry hoped soon to start organizing Maine’s woodsmen.

Perry first cooperated with Jim Freeman and other environmentalists in a successful campaign several years ago to oppose a shipping terminal on Sears Island at the head of Penobscot Bay. The paper companies would have used the port to ship wood chips and logs abroad. Environmentalists believed the terminal would destroy the bay’s beauty, and both environmentalists and organized labor saw the port as threatening Maine workers by denying them the value of processing the wood into lumber or paper.

Gorham said he also has worked with Freeman in the past. “There has to be a reaching out by labor to the environmentalists,” he added. “It’s a growing relationship.”

Gorham’s and Perry’s analysis of the joint predicament of Maine loggers and the Maine forest is backed up by Hilton Hafford, 42, of Allagash, a woodsman and organizer of a small activist group, American Workers First. It has briefly blocked several remote Quebec border crossings in the past two years to call attention to the influx of Canadian workers.

The big forest landowners tend to employ both Canadians and Americans as independent contractors, a status which denies them healthcare and worker’s compensation benefits. But the Canadians, Hafford said, can take jobs at lower pay than Americans because they are beneficiaries of the free Canadian national healthcare system, which includes worker’s comp coverage. And paychecks in American dollars go far in Canada because of the exchange rate.

The companies are also using the Canadians, Hafford said, to cut the hell out of the Maine forest: “We found we had something in common with the environmentalists. They don’t want to shut down the lumber industry. They’re asking the right question: Why are we cutting so much?” The group approached Freeman and Neils and asked for their help, and their band of environmentalists then took part in one of the border blockades.

Hafford’s group is particularly concerned about the use of Canadian labor and the heavy cutting on J D. Irving, Limited woodland. Irving is New Brunswick’s megacorporation that is Maine’s largest landowner. To draw attention to the loggers’ concerns, Freeman’s and Neil’s radical environmentalists — some of them are college students connected to the national Native Forest Network — have begun a statewide anti-Irving campaign. A year ago they started unfurling “Boycott Irving” banners on the company’s Maineway gas stations. They have hit a half-dozen or so stations to date.

The southern Maine debate

Labor and environmental activism also has begun to come together in southern Maine over the treatment of Mexican and Central American migrant workers. Perry recently organized a picketing of the job site of Piper Shores, a retirement complex being built in Scarborough. As with the loggers, the low-paid workers there and in similar workplaces, Perry said, are frequently not compensated as employees but, sometimes illegally, as independent contractors without health insurance and worker’s comp benefits.

Perry wanted to have the authorities go after the contractors and labor brokers he said were responsible for hiring the Hispanics at Piper Shores. To his chagrin, the union activism resulted in three undocumented Mexicans being deported by federal authorities — and, according to some reports, in a number more fleeing on short notice.

Freeman, Neils, and other environmentalists showed their support for the union campaign by joining in a protest October 31 outside the Augusta Civic Center. The demonstration was against a state-labor-department-sponsored conference on migrant workers.

“These meetings are just people patting each other on the back, just talking to each other,” José Soto, in his strong Puerto Rican accent, remarked scornfully of state efforts on behalf of migrants. Fundamentally, he felt, “the labor department supports the companies.” Will Neils had previously helped Soto at demonstrations during an unsuccessful attempt to unionize the DeCoster Egg Farms workers, many of them Hispanic, in the Lewiston area. Said Neils: “We found we agreed on the dangers of corporate power to humans and the environment.”

Soto believes that labor and environmental issues of justice are often related. For example, his organization has fought for a less-polluted work environment at the DeCoster plants, and it assists migrant workers on the Washington County blueberry fields avoid getting poisoned from pesticides used on the berries. “These companies have people working like animals!” he commented in disgust.

Target: the King administration

A shared theme that emerges in conversations with these environmental and labor activists is heavy criticism, even scorn, for the King administration and its Department of Labor.

Will Neils: “King and the bureaucrats are just fronts for the corporations.”

Steve Perry: “Maine labor laws are being broken on a regular basis. The state government does nothing.”

José Soto: The labor department “is a big empty balloon.”

Valerie Landry, King’s labor commissioner, felt her department at least has got people talking about the problems of Maine’s low-wage and migrant workers. She cited as evidence the Augusta conference on migrants, and pointed out that on her watch the department created a division of migrant and immigrant services.

However, she admitted the labor department is complaint-driven rather than activist. Or, rather, Landry, 47, who was an activist herself for handicapped people in the early 1980s, felt that it is as activist as it can be with limited funds. “We don’t receive substantial funding from the federal government,” she said. Does she need more state money? “We’re never going to have enough,” she replied.

Her department, she said, has only four wage-and-hour inspectors for 40,000 businesses and two monitor-advocates for 12,000 annual migrant workers. In the last legislative session, she said, King asked for more funds to deal with these issues, but the request “didn’t make it through the legislative appropriations committee.”

As for the northern Maine loggers, she said that while she has been commissioner the program that admits Canadian workers (called “bonded labor”) has seen the number of Canadians drop from about 600 to 300 people out of 2800 woodsmen in Maine. She felt that Canadians are needed because contemporary young Americans are reluctant to do rough work in the woods. Can the state do more to reduce the number of Canadian workers and help the American loggers get employment? “I don’t know how to answer your question. It’s a federal program,” she said of the bonded laborers. But her department manages it.

“The real issue for [American] loggers is wages,” she maintained. But she wasn’t sure, either, what could be done here. “You have to have the wages very high” to attract Americans, she felt.

Michael Frett, 57, the New York lawyer who is the new director of the labor standards bureau and whose office was briefly taken over on October 2, was also somewhat at a loss to respond to the activists’ demands. “I think they have the wrong doorstep,” he said of the loggers’ complaints. Like Landry, he saw them as a federal issue since Canadian bonded laborers are admitted under federal law. He takes seriously allegations that some employers may illegally treat workers as independent contractors instead of employees, but in such matters his office is complaint-driven, he said, repeating Landry.

As for the protest in his office: “I was in the ’60s. Protests have their proper place,” he said. But he claimed not to understand what the protestors wanted: “They never really defined what the protest was about.”

Where’s it all going?

John Hanson, 59, director of the University of Maine’s labor education bureau since 1978, has a long perspective on the relationship between environmentalists and organized working people, and he is cautiously optimistic that a merging of interests is taking place.

“It’s globalization,” he said of the cause of this new coalition, using the word both to mean the positive forces of global communications and the negative consequences of multinational corporations moving jobs to low-wage foreign countries.

The increasingly globalized communications network will require working people to see their wages and the environment as related in new ways, he believed. The two are related obviously in that a depleted environment — such as a clear-cut forest — can’t provide jobs, but they are also related in that companies “don’t just go offshore to pay lower wages. They do it, too, because of lower environmental standards and lower human-rights standards,” he said. Simply because of self-interest, workers and unions will begin to realize that the environment needs to be protected everywhere.

He agreed with Ed Gorham that in Maine “there is a very real concern in the labor movement about the long-term vitality of the woods-product industry, including paper.” The issue of the alleged corporate exploitation of American and Canadian woodsmen has been around for a long time, he noted. He remembered congressional hearings on the subject in Bangor in 1973. And ever since then there has been government stonewalling, he said.

Hanson did not see environmentalists and workers getting in bed together without some tussles. “There will continue to be differences on specific issues. There will be a lot of real challenges and hurdles. This is not going to be a love fest. But we have to keep the dialogue going,” he said. He is encouraged that many current labor leaders have been exposed to the environmental movement since their youth, and some of them were political activists in the 1960s and 1970s.

Last week, First District Congressman Tom Allen, a Democrat, sponsored a private meeting in his Portland office of state and federal officials, business representatives, and labor organizers including Perry, Soto, and Gorham. The subject was the misuse of workers as independent contractors.

“It was a good meeting. It opened lines of communication,” Allen reported.

Steve Perry felt the meeting was long on commitment to education — both he and Allen said that the state labor department committed itself to do more to educate employers about hiring independent contractors — but short on commitment to enforcement of the labor laws.

“They must have had 20 state troopers when we picketed that conference in Augusta,” Perry said. “Why can’t they send those troopers to construction sites?”

Lance Tapley can be reached at ltapley@ctel.net.