Racial capitalism and the duality of exploitation in forest labor contracting

Studies of labor markets in forestry have consistently found that white workers tend to fill better-paying, higher-quality jobs than workers of color. Such segmentation of labor markets is well documented in other industries and has been theorized as a general feature of racial capitalism. Although it is widely recognized that racial capitalism marginalizes entrepreneurs of color, scholarship on racial capitalism has generally focused on the precarity of workers. We interviewed workers, business owners, and forestry professionals in southern Oregon and northern California to investigate how political and economic structures shape income equity, contracting opportunities, and career mobility among workers and contractors in the forestry services industry. We found that there were not only segmented labor markets, but also a racially segmented contracting market. In what we call the “duality of exploitation,” Latino employers were placed in the position of being simultaneously the exploited and the expropriators. Immigration policy in the 1980s enabled many undocumented forest workers to gain legal status and become forestry contractors. Through barriers in federal contracting, these employers are themselves exploited while simultaneously expropriating surplus value from their vulnerable immigrant and viséed employees. Our findings elaborate existing theorizations of racial capitalism by suggesting that state policies and practices produce subject positions in which the differential distribution of power and resources fosters the exploitation of marginalized workers by similarly marginalized employers.