Big Trouble in the Lumber Capital of the World: The Past, Present, and Future of Class Conflict in Coos Bay, Oregon

In 2015, the National Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), Local 12 filed a claim with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) charging that the Southport Lumber Company had illegally denied union members work at its docks in Coos Bay, Oregon. The NLRB ruled against Local 12 and, as the union began an appeal, its members began picketing Southport. Soon, what started as a job action became a broader conflict over the future of work and organized labor. Discord spilled over into the town as residents—even those who were affiliated with the union or the company—took a side. Neighbors shouted at one another on streets. Friendships disintegrated and families were divided. Even some union members sided more with the company than they did Local 12’s leadership.

ILWU, Local 12 v. Southport was hardly the first labor-management conflict in Coos Bay, a logging town where radical industrial unions once routinely clashed with timber and shipping magnates. In previous eras, though, the lines of demarcation that divided Coos Bay were much clearer, falling neatly along class lines. But the 2015 conflict was different. Workers clashed with workers. Some employers in the town sided with organized labor. Based primarily on oral history interviews, this paper explores how class identities in Coos Bay have changed as the town was reshaped by the decline of the Pacific Northwest’s resource extraction economy. What does it mean to be working-class in a town where little industrial work remains? What does it mean to be from a logging town that produces only a faction of the lumber it did, just a few decades ago? While this paper asks these questions of Coos Bay, the answers are important for understanding how the meanings of class and community change in resource extraction towns that have lost their main resource.