The Great Timber Truce: Tacoma Mills Shut Down for a Week to Save Prices
In a rare display of unity, Tacoma’s logging camps and sawmills have agreed to a seven-day shutdown. While workers face temporary unemployment, the industry claims this 'paradoxical' move is the only way to prevent lumber prices from collapsing.
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.
TACOMA, Wash., June 7.—All the sawmills and logging camps on Grays Harbor have formed a combine by which 10,000 men will be suspended completely for seven weeks. A few smaller concerns rebelled, but were notified Monday that they would have to shut out if they did not conform with the combination.
A large number of men will be temporarily thrown out of work, but with few exceptions, they are quite willing, for suspension is the only means of keeping up the price of $16.50, and consequently wages, in the camps. Paradoxical as it may seem to most outsiders, nearly all the mills are in favor of the move, although it is primarily intended to keep up the price, not the number men employed, and a drop in logs could have had, if realized, a bad effect by giving small mills a chance to cut prices.
The chief reason for the suspension is the enormously of most of the lumber concerns. Nearly all the large mills on the harbor have surplus on hand which will last them five or six weeks. Then they have contracts for at the high $16.50 price, and intend to lumber up over a considerable period. The threatened over-production of logs, and consequently rail in prices, would reduce the few mills which have none on hand purchase after the fall at a rate which would shut them out entirely.
The lumber market, not only here, but on Puget Sound as well, is still tottering for the over-production at log is at the fifth water in the smaller streams. For a year or two there has not been water enough for any considerable period to save all the logs which have been cut on some of the smaller streams. This price, while poor has seen no fewer than 20 new camps on the small streams of the harbor, and the result has been an unprecedented rush of logs to the harbor.
A river of fire? No, a river of logs.
This 1906 agreement to halt production to stabilize prices mirrors modern debates over supply chains and market manipulation. Just as Tacoma’s lumber barons coordinated a shutdown to protect their margins, today’s tech giants and agricultural conglomerates often manage scarcity to maintain high valuations, leaving workers in limbo during the 'pause.'
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