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Natural Resources

Essential workers or disposable labor? The meaning of work in Alabama’s forest products industry and the reproduction of natural resource dependency Matthew Zinsli*, Matthew Zinsli, Kelli Russell, Mykel Taylor, Antonio Martinez, Amelia Pugh, Madison Harris,

Scholars of natural resources have generally found a negative association between community economic well-being and dependency on extractive industries such as fossil fuels, mining, and timber. Rural sociologists stress the interactive material, political, and social factors that reproduce ‘core-periphery’ relations between sites of natural resource extraction and processing, and further, the structural inequalities in labor markets that stratify access to desirable employment. Yet the discursive reproduction of these relations remains underexplored, in particular, how worker conceptions of the value of labor reaffirm ideologies of extraction. In this paper, we apply a novel framework, bringing together the concept of ‘extractive subjectivity’ (Egler & Morse 2025) and discursive framing (Gonzales, Thissell, & Thorat 2022) to examine how industry stakeholders use narratives of meaningful work to rationalize class structure, inequality, and presence of extractive industries in their communities. Our study uses the Alabama forest products industry as a case study, one of the state’s most important sectors for economic output and rural employment. We draw on semi-structured interviews with 46 participants from sawmills, manufacturers, wood dealers, and logging crews. Our sample stresses the perspectives of workers in the middle: those situated between the executive suite and the mill or forest floor, including managers, procurement personnel, and administrators. We find that participants frame labor in the industry along a spectrum from essential to disposable, categories which are comprised of four dimensions: skill, credibility, mobility, and remuneration. We argue that stakeholder narratives of the value and meaning of forestry labor support the notion that the industry’s presence in rural communities is beneficial in terms of local livelihoods and economic prosperity, while reproducing stratified labor markets and natural resource dependency.