As the work is hard, it has not been at all uncommon for employees who had received large advances to decamp.

The companies, however, took advantage of various laws similar to those mentioned in the chapter on agriculture to have these deserters arrested and to have them, when convicted, "hired out" to the very company or employer from whom they had fled.

Conditions resulting from this practice in some of the States of the Lower South became so scandalous about 1905 that numerous individuals were tried in the courts and were convicted of holding employees in a state of peonage.

In 1911 the Supreme Court of the United States declared unconstitutional the law of Alabama regarding contract of service.[1] This law regarded the nonfulfillment of a contract on which an advance had been made as _prima facie_ evidence of intent to defraud and thus gave employers immense power over their employees.

Conditions have therefore undoubtedly improved since the peonage trials, but the lumber industry is one in which the labor has apparently everywhere been casual, migratory, and lawless.
[Footnote 1: Bailey _vs._ Alabama, 219 U.S., 219.] The manufacture of tobacco shows as much diversity of labor conditions as the lumber industry.