In 1986, thousands of timber workers along the Washington coast went on strike. In the middle of the walkout, seven workers (occasionally joined by their union brothers and families) walked more than a hundred miles to Olympia.
They marched to demand that Governor Booth Gardner, scion of the very timber corporation they were striking against, intervene on their behalf.
The “Save Our Communities March” culminated in a noon rally on the Capitol Campus on Friday, July 25, 1986, attended by roughly 1,500 striking Weyerhaeuser workers and their supporters.
Gardner didn’t intervene. And the workers eventually had to surrender. During a short speech at the rally, the governor was booed and heckled as he urged workers to accept change in the industry if they wanted it to survive.
Gardner talked in the same language as timber company bosses: that competition from the American Sound and Canadian mills made the heavily union communities in the Pacific Northwest hard to pay for.
Weyerhaeuser was demanding a $6 per hour average wage and benefit concession. In return, the company offered a profit-sharing plan. They promised workers a share of the profits, but only if their specific mill performed well. The problem with that was that you needed a job to share in the profits.
Union members suspected the company was trying to claw back hard-won gains, especially given that some mills had remained profitable. A week before the rally, the strike had spread to 6,200 Weyerhaeuser workers across the Northwest.
But, the march on Olympia happened against a backdrop of unraveling solidarity, as the company began reopening mills using salaried employees and union workers who crossed picket lines. This led to scattered confrontations: rock-throwing, damaged vehicles, but the incidents were isolated.
So by that Friday, 1,000 had crossed the line, and 1,500 were shouting at the governor.
And three days later, 11 Weyerhaeuser plants were back in operation with a combined workforce of 1,600 union and non-union employees. The unions lost.
They had initially sought a wage increase and better benefits. But when the 52-day strike ended on August 18, 1986 when union members ratified a new contract that included both wage and benefit reductions and a profit-sharing plan to partially offset the losses.
Looming over the entire strike was Weyerhaeuser’s ongoing push to replace human labor with automation. In the seven years leading up to the strike, timber jobs in Oregon dropped 15 percent, even though lumber output increased. The workers knew what was coming. The spotted owl hadn’t even entered the conversation yet. It was always automation.
The workers in Aberdeen and Raymond went back to smaller paychecks and to jobs that were increasingly being done by machines. But at least they had profit-sharing.
Just weeks before the strike, a millworker named Ivan Breider told the Seattle P-I exactly what was going on: “If they got too much profit, they’ll put in new machines… or robots to do more of the jobs. That’s what they’re going to use it for—to eliminate jobs with. The men will never see it.”
He was right.
Ten years after the strike, Weyerhaeuser had cut 10,000 jobs worldwide, 1,400 in Washington alone, without cutting output.
And eight years after the strike, the Northwest Forest Plan was adopted, changing the mix of wood supply to protect endangered species like the spotted owl. But while automation had been erasing jobs steadily for years and unions had slowly capitulated, the dominant narrative became all about the owl.
Automation wasn’t unique to Weyerhaeuser. It was reshaping the entire wood products industry. Labor economists summed it up clearly: “Automation has affected us all.”
But we’ve forgotten the 1986 strike, the “March to Save Our Communities,” and the workers who saw corporate greed and automation as the real threat. We’ve replaced it with a story about a battle between environmentalists and loggers.
That shift in narrative was missed by KUOW in a recent piece about tariffs and the possibility of re-opening Northwest forests for harvest:
“So, why has the timber industry here declined so much?”
Mill manager Aaron Poquette had some answers: increased difficulty harvesting from public lands, the timber wars of the 1980s and ’90s, and wildlife protections like the spotted owl.
“The harvest volumes that come off the national forest right in our backyard are nowhere near what they were in the ’80s and early ’90s,” Poquette said. “We have this huge timber base… but we’re just not taking the harvest.”
He also cited rising labor costs, industry consolidation, and changes in forestland ownership.
What’s missing? The jobs lost to automation.
The story almost gets there:
“Barnes’ career path illustrates how, over time, mill jobs are becoming more highly skilled and valuable. Now, with AI technologies entering the mill, doing things like visually grading the quality of each board, that transition continues.”
But even then, it pivots back to supply.
Why does it matter whether the problem is supply or automation? The slow disappearance of human labor in the timber industry is part of a much larger story. The story of people vs. machines. John Henry vs. the steam drill.
This was the last-gasp strike before automation eliminated jobs, and we blamed it on an owl.
But it’s not just a story about timber workers. It’s also a story about software engineers and artificial intelligence. Microsoft is laying off thousands while leaning into AI. There’s a bone-deep fear that these high-paid, high-skill jobs will go the way of the timber mill, gone in a generation.
A few years after Zoom school hit and laptops became required, kids are now burning their school-issued Chromebooks. And I know Zoom school was the right call at the time. But something is unnerving about requiring a computer to attend school, even as we rip phones from students’ hands in the name of technophobia.
This is also a lesson about our humanity. No matter how far we go, we are still us.
In the same way, we now call for walkable neighborhoods because we’ve realized that building around cars took something from us.
Technology isn’t the enemy. Humanity is the friend.
The Luddites didn’t smash looms because they hated machines; they did it because they hated the bosses who used those machines to devalue their labor. They weren’t anti-tech; they were pro-dignity. The looms were cheaper than people, and the bosses did the math.
The same math has come for loggers. It’s coming for coders.
In a sweeping essay on AI policy, Matt Stoller points to this exact dynamic.
There is in fact a common habit of powerful monopolists choosing to point out a supposedly neutral larger-than-life force, such as ‘technology’ or ‘the future’ or ‘disruption’ or ‘globalization’ to argue that they are not responsible for the anti-social policies enabling their market power. For instance, in 2013, there were a lot of complaints about Amazon avoiding sales taxes and engaging in predatory behavior around book pricing. How did Jeff Bezos answer this charge? “Amazon is not happening to book selling,” he said, “the future is happening to book selling.” I see a lot of similarities between that political language and the AI discourse.
That language of inevitability, of shrugging responsibility that timber companies used against unions as competition from the south, from Canada, from overseas mills, is the same language we now hear in AI discourse.
And it’s why the marchers who reached Olympia 39 years ago still matter. They stood on the Capitol steps shouting for union support, even as scabs crossed picket lines and machines took their jobs. They came to save their communities.
But you can’t drive through Aberdeen today and say their community was saved.
Wendell Berry, in his essay “Conserving Forest Communities,” lays it out in practical terms. Two draft loggers, using horses and old-style skidders, logged a section of forest over two months. A single man in a modern tractor could have done it in a day. Both methods were profitable. But only one employed more people, caused less environmental damage, and strengthened the community.
The timber company and the manufacturer would answer on the basis of purely economic efficiency: the need to produce the greatest volume… in the shortest time. The community, on the contrary and just as much as a matter of self-interest might reasonably prefer the way of working that employed the most people for the longest time and did the least damage to the forest and the soil… From the point of view of the community, it is not an improvement when the number of employed workers is reduced by the introduction of labor-saving machinery.
Stoller points to an essay by Bharat Ramamurti, Zoe Jacobs, and Diego Haro, who argue that our future lies in the power of those people on the Capitol steps in 1986.
AI shouldn’t mean handing over our livelihoods to algorithms or letting billion-dollar corporations decide, unchecked, whose jobs survive. They’ve already been doing that for decades.
We need policies that give workers a voice, not after the layoffs, but before a single AI system is installed. From stronger unions to new models of industry-wide bargaining, we must make sure that the people who do the work get to help decide how the work is done.
Empowering workers to shape the future isn’t just fair. It’s the only way this leap forward becomes something that serves the many, not the few.
