The crucial difference between self-employed and small employers is that small employers have become employers of labour. Small businesses take on different characteristics as soon as labour is hired; they become involved in a web of social and economic obligations that labour requires. Businesses become financial units, which require credit and cash flow to pay labour, demanding that owners become more involved in administration and financial management of the business. Of the 30 firms sampled for semi-structured interviews, 18 could be considered small
employers. They employed on average three workers and utilised more capital than self-employed contractors. A typical operation comprised a skidder, an excavator and a log truck and trailer with an approximate total replacement value of $735,000. With an average age of 14.5 years, small employer firms were twice as old as self- employed firms. The age of the owners was also slightly older (Table 4.2).
Family labour process
Like self-employed logging contractors, small employers are heavily dependent upon family labour for the survival of their firms. Both husbands and wives participate in the logging labour circuit. Typically, women are responsible for the administrative side of the business which includes book work, finances, administration,
communication, purchasing and delivering supplies and emergency relief
I do everything. All the book work. I have to go and, I 'm the go for this, go for that person. If there's a breakdown I go and pick up parts and take them to where they want them. If they 're down a man a day I go and sit in.... I've had to drive everything, except the loader. I get a
crash course when they get stuck and have to be towed, and I'm the only one there to do it, so I'm it (Firm 10.Female).
I run it! I'm the book-keeper and the rouse-about. I run and get the oils and the greases and cut the lunches and go to the meetings and things like that (Firm 17:Female).
The typical division of labour within the administrative side of the logging labour circuit is expressed below in a discussion between a husband and wife who own a small logging firm which employs three workers.
Husband: Debbie still does most of the book work. I still do all the working out of loads, the pays, as in the pays from the mill, not the pays from the men. I deal with the mill. I do all that side of it. Quotes on
dams, whatever has to be done, bills from machines, when the machines been used on fire trails, fire-fighting for the forestry, or whatever. That's all my side of it.
Wife: I write the cheques out, pay the bills, do the wages, pay the tax, do posting, collect faxes for Don, ring about parts or do any messages done that he wants done that he can't do himself. Keep the files and all the papers and things in order where they can be found. That's about it (Firm 1:Husband and Wife).
With the employment of labour, the nature of these businesses changes. Small employers become more involved with administration and supervision of employees than self-employed, increasing the working day.
Mostly I'd work from four, four-thirty in the morning, daylight saving, till seven, and then paperwork and try to be asleep by ten o 'clock. And the weekends when my workers went home I stayed and drove the truck (Firm 28:Male).
Up quarter past five, leave at six, ah, pick up men on way to work, uhm, get to the bush about seven, where we are working now. Have a smoko about twenty past ten. Lunch one. Back to work half-past one, leave the bush about halfpast four. I come home and drop my men off at home and start doing jobs, if I need stuff to do R&M [repair and
maintenance] on machinery I get it done then and there. Get the diesel in the drum ready for tomorrow. And do all the chains, and do the general R&M, and usually home six o 'clock at night, and if there are
no problems, if there are problems it could be any hour. I organise mechanics, if I can't do the mechanical work myself And it doesn 7 stop there, and then there is the phone calls and paperwork most nights (Firm J.Male).
Although administration and management tasks become, increasingly important as the firm grows, small employers resent having to do office work. In many instances they lack office skills which are required to run a successful business.
That's one of the hardest parts of it, the book work - keeping it right.... We 're only bush people and all the extra book work and paperwork you've got to study, it does make a difference. We 're not used to it
(Firm 3:Male).
That's where we fell down in the business, I feel. We 're not educated enough to do the paper side of it. Our daughter says that we sell ourselves short about being dumb, but in a lot of respects I do feel uneducated to cope with it. And Dave's the same. He only went to 15 because he had to and we were in small country schools and that, and I do feel if I was a lot more knowledgeable I would have handled it a lot better. But we've got by (Firm 9.Female).
These comments suggest that small employers are not equipped to cope with business growth. Many studies on small business report that the main reason for small business failure is managerial inefficiency (Berryman 1993; Johns, Dunlop and Sheehan 1983, 1989; Williams 1987; McKennae/a/. 1990; Australian Chamber of Commerce 1991; House of Representatives Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology 1990).
With the increase in administration workload due to the employment of labour and the larger size of the firm the amount of time women spend on administration also increases. The contribution of women's labour in the logging firm is long-term, constant, and typically requires a commitment of a significant amount of time.
It would be very hard to say because I do the book work. I start on it at 5 o 'clock or so after he goes to work in the morning and I'm sitting there till 10, 11 o 'clock sort of thing. I might do that 2 or 3 days a week but I haven't got my other books, they 're at the accountants. So it's pretty much full-time between book work and running around (Firm
10.Female).
The percentage of female employers in logging who worked more than 40 hours is 80 per cent according to 1991 ABS Census data. This is likely to be an
underestimate of actual hours worked on business-related activities as I found that a woman's assessment of the number of hours worked was far less than observed. Many claimed that they worked only four to eight hours per week. These hours were usually the time spent on bookwork, not time spent on other activities, such as obtaining parts, getting vehicles registered, paying bills and communication. Women
found it difficult to estimate time spent on business-related activities because they overlap with domestic activities. Work dominates their lives and there is no separation between work and home, family and job. The office of these firms is in the home, and time spent on communication and on purchasing and delivering supplies and equipment is not reported as time spent working on business-related activities. This is illustrated in the following discussion between this couple:
Wife: / do the books, I do anything, if Doug needs me, go down the bush and I help him there, go to the mill and help him there. Oh, not a great deal. I do the books, write the logs in the book, might pull him out of the bog. That's about it.
Interviewer: How many hours a week would you work?
Wife: Not that many I suppose, five or six hours.
Husband: It would be at least 20 or 30 in anyway. At least 20 hours a week.
Wife: I suppose by the time you've done the forestry books and the docket books and do the phoning and running around (Firm
12-.Husbandand Wife).
Unlike many of their counterparts in farming (Alston 1995; Whatmore 1991), women in small employing businesses are actively involved in decision-making of the firm and play a major role in financial management of these firms.
I do all the banking. The bank manager doesn't believe I have a husband. He's never been in the bank. I do it all... I tell him, no you can't buy a new truck.... I was the first woman to buy a Kenworth Truck in Queensland I signedfor it, it was in my name (Firm 15.Female).
I look after all that. They don't believe he exists at the bank. They don 7 believe I've got a husband. I went in there one day and I was getting money when we was buying a tractor and I had to go in and sign all the finance papers and that and they said to me, 'Are you sure you've got a husband because we've never seen him.' If anything
needed signing, I used to bring everything home and get him to sign it (Firm 17.Female).
They were more likely to view themselves as employers than women in self-
employed firms. This is reflected in the 1991 ABS Census data where 29 per cent of all employers were recorded as women, compared with 11 per cent for self-
employed. In many cases women provided most of the labour required in other small businesses that the family might own, such as cattle farming.
/'d probably spend 7 to 8 hours a day on the business side of it. Then there's the housework, and I've got the farm as well, I've got to go out there and check the cows and put them in different paddocks and that (Firm 29:Female).
Women are also responsible for domestic household labour and childcare.
He would leave here at 12 o 'clock at night, and he might get back at 7 or 8 o 'clock at night. He 'd come home, grunt at me, have his tea, go to bed, and then get back up at 12 in the morning again. And he used to camp and I wouldn 't see him for days on end. I raised the girls by myself. At that stage, the only way we got to see him was pack up and go in the truck.... The first two years with the girls I was like a one parent family. All the responsibilities sort of rested on me (Firm
5:Female).
For their contribution, most women receive a wage, but it rarely compensates for the number of hours worked. For example, this woman is paid a nominal salary
regardless of how many hours she works.
/ get a set amount, it doesn't matter how much I do. It was $63 a week, and now it's $100 a week (Firm 1 .Female).
Others are paid a wage on paper only, putting the money back into the company. Although their husbands acknowledged the indispensability of their wives in the family labour process, most expressed a wish to exclude their wives from paid employment outside the family firm.
No way, I wouldn't allow her to work [in paid employment]! No since we've got married she's never worked (Firm 9:Male).
Of the 16 women interviewed in the small employer firms, two worked part-time and two full-time. Most women gave up their paid employment when they married or had children as was expected of them. Others gave up their paid employment due to the amount of time they spent labouring in the logging labour circuit.
/ was a nurse. I mainly gave it up because we were paying back to the government in tax and I was never home. It was too hard, what with the
business and everything (Firm 16:Female).
Women giving up paid employment to work in the family firm instead is not peculiar to logging. For example, Baxter and her colleagues (1988) found that the
opportunities for women to work outside the family firm were limited by the need for their labour to supplement their husband's work. Dempsey (1992) also found this to be the case in his study.
All farmers are loath to lose the contribution wives make to their farming activities... Even if they do hire labour they would not be able to afford to hire sufficient labour to provide the 'around the clock' availability that wives provide (Dempsey 1992:161).
The ideology of the family and wifehood are strong in rural areas and the notion that the women's place is in the home is prevalent (Dempsey 1992; Alston 1995;
Whatmore 1991; Gray 1991). Although these ideologies often restrict women's involvement in the wage labour circuit, they do not prevent them from working in the family firm.
Motivation
Most male small employers began in logging by working manually alongside their fathers. Ninety-four per cent of male small employers had parents involved in logging and most followed on 'in their father's footsteps'.
/ just followed my father's footsteps. He took me Jn and it just
happenedfrom there.... Dad had trucks and I just started going with him, and every opportunity I got when I was a little fella I'd be in the bush, with somebody (Firm 8.Male).
At the end of the last war, you could sell timber, and Dad had a lot of timber on his place, and when I was 14 years old, he handed me an axe and told me I'd better start helping cut timber, and that was it (Firm 3:Male).
Well, he's been in logging ever since he was a boy. His father was in it and his grandfather had a horse team before that and was in the
logging and so he was bom to it, actually (Firm 17-.Female).
There's about three generations in our family; my grandfather had a bullock team on the EMStern Dorrigo Plateau and was logging softwood there and gum. My father was also an axeman for him, in his younger days.... I first started working with my own machine every day when I was about 13 or 14 and that was mostly on log skidders and loaders (Firm 28:Male).
A family background in the logging industry is considered an important factor in being successful, as these comments suggest:
If you 're not born and bred out of it, you 're not successful at it. That's what I find. Anybody that's not bom and bred at it don't stay at it.
That's my theory anyway (Firm 9.Male).
I think you got to be bred into it a bit, you know. Ah, you can learn, there's no risk, but around here it's sort of been family to family a lot of it hasn 't it when it's all boiled down. People that's been in it. We've had a few outsiders come in and done it, but a lot of them don't seem to stick to it either (Firm 5Male).
The sense of family tradition and the commitment to the logging industry has been passed down through the generations. This commitment is not only to the industry, but to a rural lifestyle. Their love of the outdoors and the forest environment is a major attraction of logging contractors to this type of work.
I don't like working in an office or under a roof. It's a very enjoyable and rewarding job, not money-wise, but definitely work-wise. It '5 the fresh air, the animals... / just love being in the bush. You feel like
you 're a pioneering spirit, if you like, everyone is just doing their job, if you like, in the traditional way... there's very little interference from
the outside world (Firm 28:Male).
Similar sentiments are expressed by forest workers in Canada (Dunk 1994; Marchak 1983 and the United States (Carroll and Lee 1990, Williamson 1977).
Small employers are motivated by these sentiments and a desire to attain or preserve their independence. Bolton (1971) notes that owners of small businesses derive personal gratification by working for themselves and that the sense of
personal achievement and pride may well be more important than the financial gain. Certainly, this desire, rather than the possibility of large financial gain motivated most small employers in this study.
We are our own boss in the idea that, well if something comes up and we don't want to go to work today, I suppose we don't have to go, you know. Because you can work around it. Like if you miss a day during the week, you can always do a day on the weekend, sort of thing, and you don't have anybody to answer for, like that as long as you get the
timber into the mill that they want (Firm 16Male).
All of the women interviewed in this category entered logging through marriage, rather than any family commitment to the industry or a love of the bush. Only 38 per cent of women had parents who worked in logging and none had inherited their parents' firm.
Beliefs and attitudes
Like self-employed contractors, small employers could be considered working-class in terms of family background and work experience. This background of working for wages and the fact that they still labour manually in logging means that they hold some typically working-class beliefs despite the fact that they are employers of labour. For example, in spite of the necessity for being more involved in
administration and management activities than self-employed contractors, small employers still place greater value on manually 'productive' work than
'unproductive' work (Scase and Goffee 1982, 1987). This is expressed in their preference to be working manually in the bush rather than undertaking administrative tasks.
Better than working in an office. I just like working in the bush. I've always been involved in it (Firm J1 .Male).
/ couldn 't be cramped up in an office. I'd go bonkers in a day. I just sit here and do a couple of hours -1 can't handle it. I just love the bush, and I still like my driving, just enjoy driving more than anything.