The Forest as Factory: Technological Change and Worker Control in the West Coast Logging Industry, 1880-1930

Explores the technological changes that transformed the Pacific Coast logging industry during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Scholars and popular historians alike have depicted the introduction of steam power and overhead logging systems as responses to environmental factors. The analysis offered here, presented in the context of the labor process debate, suggests that nature structured, but did not determine, technological innovation. At the beginning of the period under study, the instability of the productive setting dictated that loggers' conceptual and physical skills controlled the pace of production. The adoption of increasingly sophisticated technologies by 1930 had given logging operators unprecedented power in their relationship with both nature and workers. Some new skilled positions had been created, but the overall effect of technological change was to undermine loggers' collective control over the labor process.