Gyppo logger

A gyppo logger (sometimes spelled "gypo logger") is a lumberjack who runs or works for a small scale logging operation that is independent from an established sawmill or lumber company. The gyppo system is one of two main patterns of the organization of logging labor in the Pacific Northwest, the other being the "company logger." Gyppo loggers were originally condemned by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) as strikebreakers.

After the founding of a government-sponsored company union, the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen, weakened the influence of the IWW on the logging industry, gyppos were seen as a component of the timber business in a less ideologically charged context.

The term is specific to the Northwest. Its etymology is certainly unrecoverable at this date. According to E.B. Mittelman it "may be a derivation from the Greek word, signifying vulture, or may simply be a derivation or corruption of the word gypsy." In either case, notes Mittelman, "it has something of the cunning or predacious in it." The Greek etymology is lent some plausibility by the fact that big lumber companies tried to use Greek workers, who wouldn't cooperate, to break a strike organized by the IWW in Everett, Washington in 1917.

The term "gyppo" was commonly prepended to form nicknames among loggers, e.g. "Gyppo Jake." The word was introduced by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) to disparage strikebreakers and other loggers who thwarted their organizing efforts. The IWW currently uses the term to refer to "Any piece-work system; a job where the worker is paid by the volume they produce, rather than by their time." Mittelman quotes an editorial from the Industrial Worker on the subject:

At present the master class of capitalists call it 'contract labor,' 'piece work,' and other fancy names...For us, the proletarians, it is 'gyppoing' and it means all that the name connotes. The gyppo is a man who 'gyps' his fellow workers and finally himself, out of the fruits of all our organized victories in the class war."

...
Wikipedia