A gyppo or gypo logger is a logger who runs or works for a small-scale logging operation that is independent from an established sawmill or lumber company. The gyppo system is one of two main patterns of historical organization of logging labor in the Pacific Northwest United States, the other being the "company logger". Gyppo loggers were originally condemned by the Industrial Workers of the World as strikebreakers. After the founding of a government-sponsored company union, the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen, weakened the influence of the IWW on the logging industry, attitudes towards gyppos changed, and they came to be seen as a normal component of the timber business in a less ideologically charged context.
Etymology and context
The term "gyppo" is specific to the Pacific Northwest region of the United States and Canada. Its etymology is certainly unrecoverable at this date. According to E.B. Mittelman, it "may be a derivation from the Greek word, signifying vulture, or may simply be a derivation or corruption of the wordgypsy." In either case, notes Mittelman, "it has something of the cunning or predacious in it." The Greek etymology is lent some plausibility by the fact that big lumber companies tried to use workers of Greek ethnicity, who would not cooperate, to break a strike organized by the IWW in Everett, Washington in 1917. The term "gyppo" was commonly prepended to form nicknames among loggers, e.g. "Gyppo Jake". The word was introduced by the Industrial Workers of the World to disparage strikebreakers and other loggers who thwarted their organizing efforts. The IWW currently uses the term to refer to "Any piece-work system; a job where the worker is paid by the volume they produce, rather than by their time." Mittelman quotes an editorial from the Industrial Worker on the subject:
At present the master class of capitalists call it 'contract labor,' 'piece work,' and other fancy names...For us, the proletarians, it is 'gyppoing' and it means all that the name connotes. The gyppo is a man who 'gyps' his fellow workers and finally himself, out of the fruits of all our organized victories in the class war."
The term lost most of its derisive connotation after the decline of the IWW's influence in the lumber industry.
The gyppo system
The "gyppo logger" is generally considered the opposite of the "company logger", who is employed by a lumber company or lumber mill at an hourly or daily wage and generally belongs to a labor union. Gyppos, on the other hand, work for themselves, run economically marginal operations, and employ a small crew on a fixed-price basis, although they occasionally work for mills on a flat-rate, contract, or piecework basis. The IWW first introduced the term gyppo during the unsuccessful 1917–18 Pacific Northwest loggers' strike, which called for an eight-hour day for loggers, although undoubtedly gyppo loggers existed before this date. Because the strike was unsuccessful, after the loggers returned to work they called a slowdown. This tactic was so effective that in response the company owners instituted piecework or flat-rate pay scales. Pine timber in the Pacific Northwest is comparatively small and much of it is on government-owned land ; these conditions facilitate logging with small crews and portable machinery. Technological developments after World War II made gyppo logging even more economically rewarding, especially the invention of gasoline-powered chainsaws, which were light enough to be used by a single person, and the use of diesel engines to power "donkeys" that had previously been powered by steam. Gyppos of this era also took advantage of the increased affordability of light industrial equipment, such as trucks and Caterpillar tractors, and typically employed family labor in order to keep their operations economically viable. According to William Robbins, writing on the postwar timber boom in the Coos Bay region of Oregon:
The immediate postwar years in southwestern Oregon were the heyday of the storied gyppo logging and sawmill operator—the hardy individual who worked on marginal capital, usually through subcontracts with a major company or broker, and whose equipment was invariably pieced together with baling wire.
By the mid-1950s, over-extraction of timber had begun to reduce the economic incentive to practice gyppo logging. By the 1970s, environmental regulation and other economic changes in the logging industry had driven many gyppo loggers out of business. By the early 21st century, gyppo loggers were described as "an endangered species."
