JACKSON COUNTY FUEL COMMITTEE (JCFC) is a free and voluntary association comprised of forestry, timber and mill workers, low-income seasonal workers, students, teachers, clergy, and other concerned community residents. We are dedicated to address the disparity between the lack of access to heating fuel for thousands of low-income workers and their families and the abundance of heating resources in the area. Volunteers joined together to form an organization specifically designed to attack the economic root of the problem and government policies that promote profits over people, while immediately providing critically needed resources.
Participation in JCFC is open to anyone who desires to see a deprived segment of the population gain access to the heating and work succinctly towards those ends. JCFC volunteers give of their time, skills and resources to help fight for improved living conditions in our lowest-income communities. By necessity, this began with and continues to this day to include fundamental survival needs such as emergency firewood, utility advocacy to prevent shut-offs, weatherization to cut heating costs. JCFC has no paid employees, provides no form of remuneration to its staff from top to bottom, accepts no government funding or any money with strings attached, and instead exists only through the dedication and generosity of the community. Outside its stated goal, no other aim or aspiration is being served.
JCFC was established in 1977 by a group of concerned community residents and members of Jackson County Workers Benefit Council and Northwest Seasonal Workers Association, in Medford, Oregon who agreed with the need to build a self-help organization specifically to address the heating and heating related problems of Jackson County’s low-income residents.
At the same time organizing efforts of seasonal workers in Medford, Oregon, where unemployment had soared for workers in the traditionally higher-paying wood products manufacturing industry following union-busting operations by international corporations that nearly eradicated union timber mill jobs. Fully, 75,000 timber and mill workers statewide were driven into low-paid, non-union service worker jobs. At the same time, Jackson County cut social services to the bone when the county lost $41 million in Oregon and California Railroad land timber receipts. Aid programs for low-paid, unemployed and underemployed workers, already extremely limited in southern Oregon virtually disappeared. People were being evicted from their homes. Families were sleeping in the street. The government funded social service progr~s of the 1960′s which had purported to assist low-income workers, had discredited themselves either by closing down altogether or cutting vital services. The 1960′s “War on Poverty” had left many refugees and little hope by the late 1970′s for the working poor, elderly and disabled. Many who had been part of earlier organizing attempts aligned themselves with JCFC to join in seeking viable solutions to the socioeconomic problems that caused workers to go without adequate, heat, medical care, food, clothing, shelter and other basic day-to-day survival needs in the most advanced industrialized nation in the world.