Expanding the Frontier of Agricultural Co-ops, Maine Loggers Gain Collective Bargaining Rights
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Last week, the Governor of Maine signed a law granting loggers and haulers the right to bargain collectively with forest owners and sawmills. Previously, loggers and haulers have had difficulty striking better contract terms with timber buyers because antitrust laws against price fixing prohibit independent contractors from coordinating.
“For too long, Maine loggers and wood haulers have been taken advantage of by large landowners, who hold significant power over these workers,” said Maine Senate President and fifth-generation logger, Troy Jackson, in a press release. “[This law] will ensure that loggers and haulers finally get what they deserve — a fair shot to have strong wages, reasonable hours and safe work environments.”
Maine’s new law expands the antitrust exemption for farmers’ cooperatives to include loggers and haulers. Yet the need for the exemption reveals a much deeper question about how we interpret antitrust laws and who is, and is not, allowed to economically cooperate.
“A group of very small firms cannot coordinate among each other to create countervailing power where they’re dealing with a very powerful buyer, for example, unless there is a special exemption,” explains Assistant Professor of Law at Wayne State University, Sanjukta Paul. By contrast, all that two or more corporations have to do in order to collude legally is merge with one another. As it stands, antitrust law has been used to target cooperation between small businesses and contractors, even as enforcers allow dominant players to build power through record-setting mergers.
In the logging industry, public and private landowners grant permits to loggers and haulers to harvest wood and sell it back to them at a piece rate per ton. Two-thirds of U.S. forests are privately owned, and in Maine, 95 percent of the state’s forestland is privately owned.
Until the ‘90s, paper mills and wood processors owned much of Maine’s forest. Increasingly, these corporations are selling their holdings to individuals and investment companies. At the same time, forest owners shifted from hiring loggers as employees to hiring loggers as independent contractors, since loggers traditionally provided their own machinery.
Some, like Dana Doran, Executive Director of the Professional Logging Contractors of Maine, argue that loggers have much more autonomy as independent business owners. Others, like Jackson, say this shift has primarily benefited landowners, depressed logging earnings, and left loggers with fewer legal protections, including the right to coordinate. While workers classified as employees have the right to form a union, it’s illegal under antitrust law for businesses, no matter how small, to conspire together or restrain trade.
Maine loggers had reason to fear legal recourse for things like sharing contract information or collective bargaining because federal antitrust enforcers have a history of targeting small proprietor coordination. In recent years, the Federal Trade Commission has gone after church organists, ice skating instructors, music teachers, and public defenders for trying to organize. Meanwhile, antitrust enforcement against the largest corporations is at a historic low. For example, the Department of Justice has filed only one civil anti-monopoly case since 2000.
Sanjukta Paul argues that antitrust law was never intended to target small players. “If you go back and look at what legislators were talking about and what the antimonopoly movement was pushing for in passing federal antitrust law, they had a specific vision of coordination rights that was very different from the one that’s being advocated by the antitrust establishment today,” she says. “It was solidarity and cooperation among the little guys … and [curbing] the power of these trusts."
Over time, some small players have received special antitrust exemptions to organize, most notably farmers’ rights to form cooperatives and workers’ rights to form unions. By expanding the scope of coverage in Maine’s state-level agricultural bargaining exemption, Maine’s new law extends the right to form bargaining cooperatives to loggers. Maine is not the first state to use this tactic; six others allow loggers to economically cooperate using agricultural coordination rights.
But most independent contractors are not covered by an antitrust exemption. As more companies begin to reclassify workers as independent contractors, more stand to lose the right to organize.
Uber, for instance, has classified its drivers as independent contractors and argued that it merely helps connect drivers with customers. Federal antitrust enforcers have implicitly supported this argument, by submitting briefs on the side of Uber and Lyft in a suit to block Seattle’s attempt to grant ride-sharing drivers collective bargaining rights.
Another group left out of collective bargaining rights is farmworkers. Farmworkers were excluded from the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which means they are not protected from retaliation or termination if they try to form or join a union.
At least twelve states have granted farmworkers the right to bargain collectively, including New York which recently joined that list. But due to high levels of turnover, seasonal work, employer intimidation, and fear of deportation, the United Farm Workers estimate that less than 1 percent of farmworkers are represented by a union. The USDA found that roughly half of all hired farmworkers are undocumented.
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After pulling their investment from Beyond Meat, Tyson Foods announced a line of new plant-based meat alternatives including imitation chicken nuggets and burgers, reports The New Food Economy.
The New York Times profiled the ways that veterinary pharmaceutical company Elanco encourages farmers to treat animals with antibiotics even when they are not sick, a practice that can breed antibiotic-resistant bacteria and make antibiotics less effective for treating infections in humans.
A global collapse in coffee prices is making it difficult for farmers to turn a profit, even those who are participating in premium programs like Fair Trade. This is driving small-scale coffee farmers in Guatemala to migrate, reports the Washington Post.
Correction: June 21st, 2019 - An earlier version of this story said that only eleven states had farmworker collective bargaining protections and that New York state "recently tried to join that list." In fact, the New York Senate passed S.6578 on June 19th, 2019. The sentence was amended to reflect this.