e otherwise.

What Is a Casual Laborer?

The problem of the logger is that of the casual laborer in general.
Broadly speaking, there are three distinct classes of casual laborers:
First, the "harvest stiff" of the middle West who follows the ripening
crops from Kansas to the Dakotas, finding winter employment in the North,
Middle Western woods, in construction camps or on the ice fields. Then
there is the harvest worker of "the Coast" who garners the fruit, hops and
grain, and does the canning of California, Washington and Oregon, finding
out-of-season employment wherever possible. Finally there is the
Northwestern logger, whose work, unlike that of the Middle Western "jack"
is not seasonal, but who is compelled nevertheless to remain migratory. As
a rule, however, his habitat is confined, according to preference or force
of circumstances, to either the "long log" country of Western Washington
and Oregon as well as California, or to the "short log" country of Eastern
Washington and Oregon, Northern Idaho and Western Montana. Minnesota,
Michigan, and Wisconsin are in what is called the "short log" region.

[Illustration: A Logger of the Pacific Northwest

This is a type of the men who work in the "long log" region of the West
coast. His is a man's sized job, and his efforts to organize and better
the working conditions in the lumber industry have been manly efforts--and
bitterly opposed.]

As a rule the logger of the Northwest follows the woods to the exclusion
of all other employment. He is militantly a lumberjack and is inclined to
be a trifle "patriotic" and disputatious as to the relative importance of
his own particular branch of the industry. "Long loggers," for instance,
view with a suspicion of disdain the work of "short loggers" and vice
versa.

"Lumber-Jack" The Giant Killer

But the lumber-jack is a casual worker and he is the finished product of
modern capitalism. He is the perfect proletarian type--possessionless,
homeless, and rebellious. He is the reverse side of the gilded medal of
present day society. On the one side is the third generation idle
rich--arrogant and parasitical, and on the other, the actual producer,
economically helpless and denied access to the means of production unless
he "beg his lordly fellow worm to give him leave to toil," as Robert Burns
has it.

The logger of the Northwest has his faults. He is not any more perfect
than the rest of us. The years of de