The Great Squeeze: How Timber Barons Cut Wages in Mason County
By consolidating operations and forcing loggers into company-controlled boarding houses, the industry’s giants effectively reduced worker pay while crushing independent competition.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
SHELTON, Jan. 3.—The Washington Southern Railway Company has issued an order making a general reduction in the wages of loggers, which will be a significant cut during the winter months, especially on account of the uniform charge of $5 a week for board and full deductions for lost time. The employing loggers held a meeting recently and adopted a new, lower scale of wages. The logging business has not been very profitable for some time, and larger concerns are moving to improve their margins. The object is to concentrate the logging business in the hands of a few operators, reduce wages in general, and combine to enforce these reductions. The Puget Sound & Gray's Harbor Railroad Company, owned by the Port Blakeley Mill Company, bought out half a dozen independent loggers on the road, and Sol G. Simpson is now solely operating all the camps in the area. The company furnishes the cars and sidetracks, supplies goods at wholesale prices, and pays $3.50 for logs loaded on cars at camp landings. While this closing out of small loggers is a radical change—as heretofore nearly anyone with a few hundred dollars could get a chance to log—it has gradually been done, and the combination will soon be effective in reducing wages to the Eastern scale.
“The object is to concentrate the logging business in the hands of a few operators, reduce the wages in general, and combine to enforce the reductions.”
This 1892 report highlights the birth of the 'company town' and industry consolidation in Washington, where corporate monopolies squeezed both wages and independent competitors. It mirrors modern concerns over the consolidation of power in the gig economy and the housing-market control exerted by large corporate landlords, showing that the struggle for worker autonomy in the face of centralized ownership is a persistent thread in Pacific Northwest history.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.