By Tom Knudson -- Bee Staff Writer
Published Thursday, March 2, 2006
WASHINGTON - The abuse of Latino forest workers by U.S. Forest Service contractors emerged from the backwoods of America on Wednesday and stepped onto the national stage at a Senate subcommittee hearing that could be a spark for lasting reform.
"Evidence suggests we continue to have great difficulty enforcing health, safety, immigration and labor laws of this country when it comes to these contracts," said Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests.
Frustrated by the recurring nature of the problem - Congress first examined the issue in 1980, then again in 1993 - Craig suggested legislative action might be required to address some problems, including the mistreatment of forest workers who labor legally here as H2B guest workers.
For starters, Craig said some reforms could be folded into the package of immigration and guest worker legislation, which the Senate is scheduled to begin considering today.
Four witnesses at Wednesday's hearing, two from California and two from Oregon, offered up a banquet of suggestions, from the creation of a Forest Service/Department of Labor task force to report to Congress, to overhauling Forest Service contracts to steer economic benefits toward contracting companies in communities hard-hit by the 1990s logging downturn.
"Exploitation of these workers has devalued (Forest Service) contracts to ridiculously low levels to where we can't compete," said Cindy Wood, a forest contractor whose firm, Wood's Fire and Emergency Services, is located in Plumas County. Wood was the last to testify at Wednesday's afternoon session.
The hearing was triggered by a November Bee investigation - "The Pineros: Men of the Pines" - that detailed widespread wage exploitation and hazardous working and travel conditions affecting an estimated 20,000 Latino forest workers, about half of them legal guest workers.
Attorney Michael Dale, executive director of the Northwest Workers' Justice Project in Portland, urged the subcommittee to push for better tracking of the guest workers once they arrive in the United States. And Dale said they deserve the right to a federal legal aid lawyer when they are mistreated - something they are now denied by law.
"There is no rational basis for this exclusion," he said in written comments filed at the hearing. "Its elimination would do more to improve the conditions of H2B forestry workers than any other step that Congress could take."
After the Bee stories were published, Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth ordered his agency to rewrite its labor contracts to clearly identify violations of wage and safety law. He also called on his employees to report violations, when they see them, to the Department of Labor.
While it's too early for Bosworth's fixes to be tested - the work season awaits the spring thaw in most places - concern was expressed Wednesday that they don't go far enough.
Just reporting violations to the Department of Labor is "simply passing the buck," Wood said in her written testimony. "If the Forest Service representative knows enough to promptly report the situation, they should also be stopping all work."
Witness Lynn Jungwirth, director of the Watershed Research and Training Center in Hayfork, west of Redding, said, "This problem has been going on for 30 years. ... We need a new model."
Specifically, Jungwirth called on the Forest Service to stop handing out work to companies that employ unskilled migrant labor, which works fast and cheap, and instead offer more complex bid packages that would attract a more stable work force.
"We need a work force that is multi-skilled, that can do reforestation, thinning, data surveys and work with wildlife," she said.
In her written testimony, Wood told lawmakers about her firsthand experiences with the mistreatment of laborers on the Plumas National Forest, where she subcontracted work only to discover conditions including "unhealthy sleeping conditions for foreign guest workers in the field when it was freezing or snowing; unacceptable foot attire; and transport vehicles lacking proper license and other certification information."
Cassandra Moseley, director of the Ecosystem Workforce Program at the University of Oregon, reported similar bleak findings from recent studies and fieldwork.
"Half of forestry workers in Oregon earn about $4,400 a year," she said. "And more than 85 percent earn less than the federal poverty level for a family of four."
In her written testimony, Moseley said problems are rooted in a Forest Service culture driven by meeting work targets.
"With declining budgets for federal forests and national direction to do more with less, incentives to ignore impacts on communities, contractors and workers become even stronger," she wrote.
Mark Rey, undersecretary for natural resources and the environment for the Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service, said new steps are being taken to protect workers.
Those include "increased follow-up actions" by Forest Service contract inspectors when violations are spotted and, he said, providing the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration with a list of upcoming projects involving guest workers.
Wednesday's hearing was called by Sen. Jeff Bingaman, a New Mexico Democrat who expressed concern at the session about the economic hit on small rural towns when the Forest Service hires contractors from outside the region.
Wood blamed that on the Forest Service's so-called "best value" bidding practices, under which the agency says it awards jobs based not on lowest bid but on the best overall value. When she and two other contractors took their concerns about the about lowest-bid practices to Plumas National Forest Supervisor Jim Peña, she said they were disappointed.
"We gleaned a lot of information from that meeting about the pressure ... to get more acres for the money at any cost, even at (the cost of) small business survival. How is that best value?
"I heard that exploitation of workers is tolerated because of bottom-line dollars."
Peña, in a separate interview last week, defended his forest's labor contracting procedures: "I don't have the ability to select local contractors to the exclusion of anybody that's able to bid. And I believe that is really what they want to see happen."
About the writer:
- The Bee's Tom Knudson can be reached at (530) 582-5336 or tknudson@sacbee.com.