Thread: The Pineros: Forest workers caught in web of exploitation

http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/projects/pineros/

Across vast tracts of rugged ground from Maine to California, Latinos do the dirty work in America’s woods. They plant trees by the millions, thin out snarls of vegetation that stunt the growth of commercial timber and slash away the dense mats of brush and spindly trees that stoke forest fires.

They are pineros, the men who work in the pines. They are the major source of manual labor in America’s forest industry, the muscle behind the Healthy Forest Initiative - often paid in tax dollars to work on public lands. And they are being misused and abused under the noses of government officials.

Even frequent visitors to America’s forests may never see them. They live in motels and campgrounds on the fringes of society, traveling through resort towns long before dawn on their hours’-long commutes to deep backwoods areas.

In this three-part investigation, The Bee takes you inside the hidden lives of the pineros.


Part 1

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The Pineros: Forest workers caught in web of exploitation
Foreign guest laborers take jobs most Americans don't want. But those invited to work in the woods have hardly been offered our hospitality. On public and private land, they suffer injury, abuse, even death.
Stories by Tom Knudson and Hector Amezcua -- The Sacramento Bee
Published Sunday, November 13, 2005 -- 1 of 3 parts


During the day, the men swung machetes and worked in the woods. At night, they lay in ragged tents, wrapped themselves in layers of clothing and nearly froze.

As the migrant workers suffered, U.S. Forest Service officials in Idaho supervising the work were taking notes. But their primary concern was trees, not people. "Pace too slow," one jotted in a memo. "Foreman not active enough vis a vis quality, production, direction."

Pineros - pine workers, as Latino forest laborers are known - have long battled abusive working conditions. But today, there is a new edge to the drama: Much of the mistreatment is unfolding inside a government program that invites foreign workers to the United States to fill labor shortages.

Unlike millions of Latin Americans who cross the border illegally to work in El Norte, the pineros toiling on federal land in Idaho were in this country legally, part of a small army of foreign residents who fill low-paying, non-farm jobs under a little-known federal guest worker program.

Yet the 10,000 or so forest guest workers, who plant trees across the nation and thin fire-prone woods out West as part of the Bush administration's Healthy Forests Initiative, have hardly been treated with hospitality.

A nine-month Bee investigation based on more than 150 interviews across Mexico, Guatemala and the United States and 5,000 pages of records unearthed through the Freedom of Information Act has found pineros are victims of employer exploitation, government neglect and a contracting system that insulates landowners - including the U.S. government - from responsibility.

Foreign guest workers take jobs most Americans don't want - in fact that is a condition of their employment. They mow lawns, wash dishes, clean hotel rooms. Of the estimated 66,000 guest workers in this country, forest workers are the second-largest group, after landscape laborers.

And employers want more of them. This spring, Congress passed legislation making it easier for companies to hire the nonresident employees, officially known as H2B workers to distinguish them from H2A guest workers in agriculture. Bush administration officials support expanding the H2B work force, saying legal temporary foreign workers help solve myriad problems of undocumented labor.

But in the backwoods, where pineros often lack adequate training, protective gear or medical supplies, where they sweat, struggle and suffer, the current forest guest worker program casts a shadow across its future.

"There is a move to use this program and hold it up like it's a darling child, but on the ground, it's so problematic," said Maria Andrade, a Boise, Idaho, attorney who works with migrant laborers.

Guest forest workers are routinely subjected to conditions not tolerated elsewhere in the United States, The Bee investigation found. They are gashed by chain saws, bruised by tumbling logs and rocks, verbally abused and forced to live in squalor.

Rainstorms pummel them. Cold winds sweep over them. Hunger stalks them. And death claims them. Across Honduras and Guatemala, 14 guest workers lay in tombs, victims of the worst non-fire-related workplace accident in the history of U.S. forests.

In addition:

• Over the past decade, forest contractors certified by the U.S. Department of Labor to hire foreign guest workers have shorted them out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in wages and violated scores of state and federal laws. Some employers have taken workers' visas and personal papers, including deeds to cars and even a home - in effect, holding them hostage to hard labor.

• The H2B forest workers toil in a regulatory void. Rules that protect H2A farmworkers - such as requirements for free housing and access to federal legal services - don't extend to forest guest workers.

• In national forests, where the contractors are paid with tax dollars, federal officials overseeing the work witness the mistreatment and wretched working conditions. But they don't intervene. Responsibility for workers, they say, rests with the Department of Labor and the forest contractors themselves.

• And, where government oversight of contractors exists, it's often inconsistent. Companies cited by one branch of the Labor Department for abusing forest guest workers are regularly certified by another branch to recruit and hire more.

This fall, 17 guest workers slashed through dense stands of pine and fir in Montana's Bitterroot National Forest for a contractor with a history of labor violations: Universal Forestry of Orofino, Idaho.

While cutting a dead tree without safety goggles - another violation - one of them was struck in the face by a branch, which gouged a deep crescent beneath his eye. The company declined to discuss the situation in Montana. But other crew members complained of unsafe working conditions, of unexpected payroll deductions and of hunger.

"We are uneasy because we don't even have enough money to eat," said Luciano Hernández, who said he was down to his last $15.

One worker found nutrition in a tiny pond behind a gas station. Tying a piece of line to a branch, he baited a hook with chicken scraps and caught two small trout. Back at his cabin kitchenette, as the fish were being fried, a colleague eyed them hungrily.

"You can even eat the bones!" said Luis Andres Molina Hernández.

"No, you can't," replied the fisherman, Johnny Beitia.

"Yes, you can," said Molina, peeling away a partly cooked bone, placing it on his tongue and swallowing. "But you have to be careful."

For years, the plight of H2B forest workers has remained out of sight, concealed by the remote job sites and the wariness of the workers, who generally don't speak English and fear retaliation by employers. Last spring, though, allegations of shabby treatment surfaced in a petition filed with Mexico's government under the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation, a part of the North American Free Trade Agreement devoted to labor rights and standards.

"Abuse is endemic to this system," said Mary Bauer, a lawyer with the Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama who has sued three forest contractors on behalf of guest workers. "Basically, we're importing indentured servants to perform government functions. That's really what this is."

The labor contractors who hire guest workers and put them to work on public and private land characterize accounts of mistreatment as overblown. They say they are beleaguered by government regulations, worker advocates and pineros who distort the truth and don't work hard enough.

"There are so many things you are continually battered with," said Robert "Wade" Zaharie, an Idaho contractor previously cited for federal labor violations and sued by his workers. "In this industry, you are always going to be painted as a bad person."

Paved with yearning for a better life, the road to a forest guest worker job begins in the gullied fields and gritty towns of Mexico and Central America. It springs from a landscape of scrawny cattle, rickety bikes and stifling poverty, where workers earn as little as $2.50 a day.

It weaves through a blur of bus stations, cheap motels and crowded work vans and ends in forests across the United States, where many arrive in debt to their employer for travel and other expenses.

Mexicans and Central Americans first began to trek north as H2B workers in the late 1980s, following the landmark 1986 federal Immigration Reform and Control Act's sanctions for hiring undocumented workers.

Since then, the demand for legal guest workers in forestry has soared, from about 4,000 in 1996 to about 27,000 in 2004, records show. Though not all those requests are filled, the H2B workers represent a large portion of the estimated 15,000 to 20,000 Latinos laboring in America's woods.

Over the years, the work of novelist John Steinbeck, CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow and labor organizer Cesar Chavez thrust the plight of farmworkers into the public consciousness, peeling away their status as los olvidados, the forgotten ones.

But forest workers continue to live and work in obscurity.

"Somos los desconocidos" - we are the unknown ones, said Odilio Castro, an undocumented pinero injured by a falling tree last year in the Sequoia National Forest. "When you tell somebody you work in the woods, they have no idea what you do."

The forest worker season begins in November on corporate pine plantations in the South, where trees grow in rows and most of America's wood is now harvested. But by April, the pineros drift toward the jade-green forests of the mountain West.

Pineros plant trees and thin vegetation on a gargantuan scale. Saddled with gear - from the bags of seedlings weighing up to 50 pounds that swing from their hips to the gallon-sized jugs of gas, oil and water strapped to their belts - they trudge across rough ground where heavy equipment can't go: the slippery slopes, soggy stream banks and rock-infested ridges.

Whether here as legal or undocumented workers, pineros share a common experience. They tend to live on the rundown edges of rural towns, sleeping three or four to a bed and sprawling across the floors of rental homes, trailers, budget motels and even tarp lean-tos. Often, they're on the move - commuting long distances to work, slipping through mountain resorts before dawn.

Other things set the legal guest workers apart.

"Most are the kind of people who would not pay a 'coyote' to cross the border," said Maria Andrade, the Idaho lawyer. "Some are professionals in their home countries. Most have never been to the U.S. before. They have no family members here, no support network."

That isolation increases the danger, as an inspector for the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration discovered in 2002 at a job site in the Ouachita National Forest in western Arkansas.

"They go just as fast as they can through the woods, cutting on the run," the inspector wrote. "Almost all the employees have been hit by branches of trees other employees have felled ... . One worker was operating a chain saw ... when the saw became pinched, he jerked the saw back and the chain on the saw tore into his leg, creating a gash approximately 5-6 inches in length ... . When he exposed his injured leg, it was obviously infected."

Vicente Vera MartÃÂ*nez, a Mexican truck driver, remembers the incident well. He was the one hurt.

"It happened so fast," he said when tracked back to his home in Santiago Ixquintla, south of Mazatlán. "The pine tree was a little crooked. The chain saw wasn't sharp. I had to force it. That's what caused the saw to kick back."

Sitting on a plastic chair in his father's backyard, Vera MartÃÂ*nez pulled up his left pant leg to show the scar. It resembled a giant brown leech. His father, Jesús Vera Flores, scowled.

"We had no training," said Vera Flores, who worked with his son in Arkansas. "The foreman just took us to a place and said, 'Get to work.' "

"They wouldn't give us goggles," he added. "The chaps only came to above our knees. The saws had no safety locks. When my son was hurt, we had to carry him down a hill. It took about an hour. The van we were riding in didn't have a first-aid kit."

Three years later, word of the critical OSHA inspection still had not reached top levels of the Ouachita National Forest, much to the surprise of some there. In response to The Bee's inquiries, the forest's public affairs officer, Cheryl Chatham, said, "We're going back and taking a look at what's going on out there."

For many forest guest workers, though, the greatest pain is financial. Back home, recruiters tell them they will earn $7 to $13 an hour - a fortune for most Latin Americans. But once in the United States, many see their wages whittled away - sometimes to less than the minimum wage - by deductions for gas, food, lodging, tools and even, in one case, using a portable outhouse. Often, the work is spotty.

Rafael Pérez Pérez listened to a recruiter and couldn't resist.

Pérez was a Mexican bookseller in 1996 when he traveled north as an H2B worker to earn some extra money for his wife and four children by planting trees in Mississippi. Earlier this year, he sat in a hotel restaurant in the provincial capital of Aguascalientes, took a sip of black coffee and pulled out a check he earned working on Georgia Pacific land.

For 15 hours of work, Pérez grossed $105.01 - $7 dollars an hour. But after deductions for travel ($20), a recruiting fee ($50), a salary advance ($25), Social Security and Medicare ($8.03), his actual paycheck was for just $1.98 - 13 cents an hour.

"It was unbelievable," Pérez said. "I didn't even bother to cash it because it cost $2 to cash a check."

"If we worked 12 hours, the foreman would write down eight," Pérez said. "If we planted 2,000 trees, they'd say you planted 500 of them bad. They had the perfect formula to have the worker unable to escape."

With so little money, Pérez and his fellow guest workers had to borrow from their employer, contractor Progressive Forestry Services Inc. That meant more deductions. With every paycheck, "we would earn less and owe more," he said, "until we realized, 'We're never going to be able to pay this off.' "

The low point came over a hot plate with other workers in a motel room on Dec. 25. "We didn't have money to go to a restaurant. So we bought hot dogs for Christmas dinner - nothing else, just hot dogs. It was very sad."

Pérez quit after two months and returned to Mexico. Later, he and three others sued Progressive Forestry in a class-action federal court case. The total settlement for 380 guest workers was $127,500. Pérez recovered $4,175.

Following the suit, Progressive Forestry's owners formed new firms and continue to employ H2B workers. They said Pérez's lawsuit destroyed their company and they disputed his charges.

"The guy did not want to work," said Bruce Campbell, a co-manager of Progressive Environmental LLC in Idaho. "He was - and I hate to use the word - a bad egg. He was not there to work. He was there causing problems."

Robert Zaharie, who signed Pérez's $1.98 check as Progressive's president and has since formed the forest contracting firm Alpha Services LLC, responded via fax: "Employers lose thousands of dollars each year being humanitarians," he wrote. "When workers show up, employers give cash advances. ... Sometimes they leave with the money and never work. We have been more indentured to our workers than they have ever been to us."

Former partners turned competitors, Zaharie and Campbell are part of a tangle of Idaho-based H2B contractors linked by legal woes and regulatory infractions. Zaharie began his career with Evergreen Forestry Services, which has been cited for hundreds of federal labor law violations. Evergreen's owner, Peter John Smith III, joined Campbell's company while appealing the government's efforts to put him out of business. Universal Forestry's owner, Heber Matute, once worked for Smith.

"Most of these guys know each other," said Jill Ellis, co-owner of Renewable Forestry Services Inc., an H2B reforestation firm in Georgia. "It's amazing. If you tried to chart it, it would look like tree roots."

Only a handful of outsiders have peered into the world of forest guest workers. One is anthropologist Josh McDaniel, who interviewed contractors and pineros and published his findings with a colleague this year in the Journal of Forestry, one of the nation's most prestigious forestry publications.

"Contractors seemed to play a lot of games with workers' pay," said McDaniel, who recently stepped down as an assistant professor at Auburn University to move to Colorado with his wife. "They would withhold money until workers had nearly fulfilled their contracts. Then they would work them really hard until they would leave and forfeit their last big chunk of money."



Pineros have little recourse. Under the H2B program, they cannot take a job with another employer. That, McDaniel said, is an invitation to abuse.

Legal responsibility for guest workers is spread widely. The State Department, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol oversee visas and entry to the United States. The Department of Labor, which certifies employers to hire workers, is charged with monitoring pay and working conditions.

McDaniel found that oversight of workers is rare. "There are not a lot of inspections," he said. "The crews are really hidden. I had a hard time finding them - and I was really trying. There is very little regulation at all."

Regulation of H2B workers fell into a bureaucratic catacomb from the very start, when Congress split a pre-existing guest worker program for agriculture into two branches in 1986. At the time, it grafted rules to protect farmworkers, including the right to a federal legal aid lawyer, onto the H2A branch of the legislation. But it left the H2B limb bare.

"There weren't many H2B visas issued then, so it wasn't an issue," said Michael Dale, an Oregon lawyer and migrant advocate.

Candelario Pérez is one of many guest workers who have found themselves in need of those protections. Like most, he borrowed money for the journey to the United States - $900 for a plane ticket, $300 for his visa, even $50 for a physical required by the guest worker program.

Back home in Panama, a company recruiter had told him he would earn $10.50 an hour. But that promise was evaporating. Working for Universal Forestry in Idaho, his paychecks were late. Deductions for gas, food, motels and a chain saw eroded his pay. Pérez and his co-workers grew so desperate, they poached deer out of season. "I was hungry," he said. "I had to eat."

Feeling cheated, he sought legal help. But by law, he could not turn to the first line of defense for most migrant workers: a legal aid lawyer. Instead, after months of looking, he found Andrade, the private attorney from Boise, who took his case.

In general, H2B workers aren't that lucky.

"Most private attorneys don't want them," said Roman Ramos, a paralegal with Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid Inc. "For all practical purposes, there is nobody to turn to. It would take an act of Congress to give these folks some protection."

Pérez's plight was among those presented this spring in Mexico under the NAFTA labor accord. The petition bulges with allegations of wage exploitation, wretched living conditions, backbreaking labor and regulatory neglect.

It says that Pérez and five co-workers were forced to camp in the mountains as temperatures approached freezing. "There were no sleeping pads, mattresses or sleeping bags," the petition reports. "The only drinking water was untreated and came from a creek."

On Sept. 26, 2000, Pérez and another worker filed complaints with the Department of Labor. Four months later, the department responded that, "it could not take action because the complaints were in Spanish," says the petition.

Finally, in early 2003, the federal agency found Universal had shorted 29 forest guest workers out of more than $6,400 in wages, including Pérez, who was owed $631.25.

Allegations about living conditions went unsubstantiated, the petition says, because the Labor Department was too slow. The work was done, and the workers gone, by the time the government got involved.

Only months after the Labor Department's findings, Universal was back at work on a federal contract in the Clearwater National Forest in Idaho. The focus once again was the trees, not wages or working conditions.

"Francisco worked the crew straight thru lunch and finished planting out the trees at 1410 (2:10 p.m.)," one Forest Service inspector wrote in his field diary on May 24.

"It was a sunny, hot day and the crew was dragging," he added. "I told Francisco that even though it was hot and the guys appeared tired they still needed to dig deep holes to accommodate the 14" roots. Francisco got on the crew and they finished out the day OK."

Asked about that field diary, the supervisor of the Clearwater National Forest, Larry Dawson, said it did not bother him. Contractors set working hours, not the government, he said.

"If the contractor makes the choice to continue working, recognizing that they're hot and conditions are difficult, we continue to hold them accountable to plant the trees correctly," Dawson said.

"If they're hot, yeah, what else is there to say?" he added. "Of course, it is difficult work."

Migrant advocates had another take on such incidents. "We are financing these abuses - and the profits people wring from them," said Maria Andrade.

Universal's owner, Matute, said he doesn't mistreat his employees, but acknowledged he works them hard.

"With these government jobs, I have pressure to get the job done," he said. "I am pressing the guys to do the job that needs to be done. Otherwise, I don't get paid."

Emilio Morales Donis of Guatemala City, who worked four months for Universal in 2002, said he felt Matute sometimes pushed too hard - and not always on the job. He said he watched Matute seize the passports of a group of Mexican H2B workers. "They couldn't even go out on the street because they had no documents, Morales said. "In my way of thinking, he detained them like slaves."

Matute said he needed the documents to fill out office paperwork. "Everybody got them back," he said.

Jesús Vera Flores and Vicente Vera MartÃÂ*nez, the father and son from Santiago Ixquintla, say something similar happened to them as they sought employment with another contractor for work in the Arkansas national forest. They turned over the deeds to their cars as a guarantee they would finish the work.

"We felt like we were imprisoned, held captive," said Vera MartÃÂ*nez. "What else did he need, a whip?"

In the choppy, green hills of northern Guatemala, Edilberto Morales Luis has more than memories to remind him of his time as a guest worker in U.S. forests.

A quiet, solidly built man in his mid-20s, Morales is the lone survivor of a van accident in Maine that took the lives of 14 H2B forest workers.

It happened not on the job - but on the grueling drive to work on private land owned by a timber company called Pingree Associates. Shortly before 8 a.m. on Sept. 12, 2002, the driver of a van in which Morales was riding lost control while crossing a one-lane wooden bridge and tumbled upside-down into the Allagash River.

One morning last spring, Morales shuffled across a small bedroom in his home and pointed to a picture of eight guest workers, posing for a group photo in the Maine woods.

"He died. He died. He died," he said, touching one face after another. "That one's my uncle. He died."

In early 2002, Morales had left Guatemala with an H2B visa to work for Evergreen Forestry Services, an Idaho-based reforestation contractor. But there was something he and his co-workers on the Maine job did not know, something buried in the U.S. government's files: Evergreen had a long record of mistreating workers.

"Subject has a lengthy and woeful history of non-compliance," a federal inspector wrote in 1998. "(Its) history reads like 'The Anatomy of a Worst Violator.' " Evergreen had altered timecards and failed to pay overtime, the files say, shorting workers out of more than $250,000 in all.

Two years later, another investigator cited Evergreen for a thicket of additional violations, including transporting workers in an unsafe van. "The vehicle ... had visible bald tires," the investigator wrote.

The Bee tried to reach Peter Smith, Evergreen's owner, on several occasions, but he did not return calls.

Government files also contained letters from migrant advocates, pleading with the Labor Department to stop Evergreen from hiring foreign workers. Yet while one branch of the Labor Department, the wage and hour division, was repeatedly citing Evergreen, another branch - the employment and training administration - was authorizing it to hire H2B workers.

After the van accident, migrant advocates were outraged.

"The very agencies whose duty it was to protect workers fell down on the job," said Lori Elmer, an attorney for forest workers in North Carolina. "They had all the information and still didn't do anything. It was a complete breakdown."

In December 2002, the Labor Department revoked Evergreen's license. Last year, it fined the company $17,000 - $1,000 for each fatality, $1,000 for Morales and $2,000 for failing to register the van or driver as required under the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act.

That fine has not been paid and Smith remains in business at Progressive Environmental, where he became president this year, Idaho state records show.

Since 2003, Smith's new company has been awarded $238,000 in government contracts for work on Forest Service and U.S. Bureau of Land Management land in Oregon and Montana, according to the Federal Procurement Data System, an online inventory of federal contracts.

Labor Department spokeswoman Dolline Hatchett said Smith's involvement with another reforestation company is legal because he has appealed the agency's revocation of his license. "It's all still up in the air," she said.

Scattered across Central America are the remains of 14 Evergreen workers whose perspectives on the matter will never be heard. One is Morales' uncle, Juan Saénz Méndez, who had journeyed north to earn money for his wife and six children.

Today, Saénz lies in a concrete-block tomb draped with pink, green, white and black ribbons. At midday, the cemetery is quiet. The ribbons flutter in a hot breeze.

"We will always remember you dear Juanito," the inscription on the tomb reads, in Spanish. Below that, it adds:

El sueño Americano nos privo de tu presencia - the American dream has deprived us of your presence.

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The Pineros: Hidden hazards
Although Congress has expressed its outrage at the treatment of forest workers, the government has done little to improve conditions. For those who toil deep in the woods, the threat of being injured or killed is an everyday reality.
Stories by Tom Knudson and Hector Amezcua -- The Sacramento Bee
Published Monday, November 14, 2005 -- 2 of 3 parts


With a whoosh, the branch whipped through the air, striking Carlos Valdez in the face. He heard a popping sound in his right eye. The pain was electrifying.

The biggest jolt was yet to come. When the young laborer in the Tahoe National Forest opened his eye and tried to see, his vision was gone. "I started to shake," Valdez recalled. "I began to throw up out of fear. I didn't want to lose my eye."

Three years later, Valdez squints into the amber-colored evening light of California's San Joaquin Valley. The accident on a federal job thinning brush and dead trees near Camptonville not only blinded his eye, it sowed a long spell of depression and chronic head and eye pain. But it left no mark on the government.

By law, all serious job injuries in the United States must be reported to authorities. Valdez's wasn't. The Tahoe National Forest said it wasn't responsible. Valdez's employer, Redding Tree Growers of Exeter - which gained the government contract for the work - said it wasn't aware of the law. As a result, there was no investigation by the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health and no fine, even though Valdez said the firm failed to provide him with safety goggles.

First in 1980 and again in 1993, Congress expressed shock at the abuse of Latino forest workers in America's woods and the hypocrisy of undocumented workers doing government work. Today, despite the influx of thousands of legal guest workers into reforestation, much of the work force remains undocumented. And the abject living conditions and wage exploitation that outraged Congress endure.

But at neither time did Congress examine the most pressing danger to Latino forest workers: the threat of being injured or killed on the job.

A nine-month Bee investigation has found that reforestation work, the thinning and planting that keeps both public and private forests healthy, is one of the most hazardous occupations in America - and one of the most overlooked by state and federal regulators.

On Forest Service and national park jobs visited by The Bee this year, peril was paramount. Slashing away at dense tangles of trees with chain saws, the pineros - Spanish for pine workers - scrambled through the woods in a chaos of cutting and noise. One gashed his knee: eight stitches. Another toppled a tree that tore into his face: six stitches. Others slipped and slid across steep slopes in cheap work boots that lacked treads. Protective gear was optional. Safety goggles and non-slip boots, required by law for most work, were rarely used.

Government inspectors see the danger, too.

"Crew drove up and informed me that one of them was hurt," one federal reforestation inspector for the Shasta-Trinity National Forest in California wrote last year. "Crew member had a rag covering his head and left eye."

Like foremen, Forest Service inspectors oversee the work pineros do in the national forests. They distribute tools, hand out seedlings, watch pineros toil in pounding rain, sleet and hot sun, tell them to slam their heavy planting tools into rocky ground. They jot down the wretched working conditions in their work diaries. In most cases, they are the only government officials who even know where the crews are laboring.

Yet most Forest Service inspection notes are studies in indifference. They reflect not concern for workers but frustration with the pace of the job.

"More folks just standing around," one federal tree planting inspector for the Clearwater National Forest in Idaho wrote last year.

"I finally screamed at (the foreman) to 'not have 15-min. discussion about it,' just plant 'god damned things.' He was somewhat taken aback. Crew started planting."

On private land, risks are harder to observe. But off the job, the injuries and deaths are remembered with stories, death certificates and grainy photographs. In a small apartment in Medford, Ore., one Latino forest worker reached for the picture of a co-worker killed in California last year.

"I'd known him since he was a little kid," the pinero said of Ricardo Ponce León, an 18-year-old undocumented forest worker run over and killed by a trailer on a dirt road while spraying pesticides for a private land owner outside Redding last year. "His dream was to come here and make a better life, for himself and his family in Mexico. But God did not allow it."

Six federal departments and a constellation of state agencies share responsibility for reforestation workers. But the occupational safety and health officials who inspect work sites rarely visit a reforestation job. Redding Tree Growers, for example, has not been inspected by the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health in more than a decade.

The reason? Workers, most of whom speak no English, rarely complain to authorities. Accidents, which normally trigger an investigation, often go unreported. Crews work in remote locations and move frequently, making them hard to target for random inspections.

In more than two decades of thinning and planting across the West, pinero Santiago Calzada has seen a government safety inspector just once.

"Contractors do whatever they want," said Calzada, who lives in Medford. "And there are hardly no witnesses."

The U.S. Forest Service, which spends millions of taxpayer dollars on reforestation of public lands every year, says safety, pay and immigration violations are not its problem. "We're the Forest Service. We're not the INS or the Department of Labor," said Matt Matthes, a Forest Service spokesman in California.

But the INS - known now as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement - hasn't inspected a reforestation job in California in years. Instead, it has shifted its attention to terrorism and national security.

Twelve years ago, a story in The Bee about the poor conditions endured by undocumented forest workers on federal land touched off a flurry of media coverage and a critical congressional report titled: "Look Who's Minding the Forest: Forest Service Reforestation Program Due For a Major Overhaul."

"We cannot tolerate these conditions, or even the perception that we allow such conditions to exist," wrote the chief of the Forest Service in 1993, Dale Robertson. "Let me state this very clearly: It is Forest Service policy to do business only with responsible contractors who obey federal, state and local laws."

The Forest Service has not walked that talk.

Despite calling for tougher law enforcement and assembling a 264-page watch list of troubled contractors, the agency today routinely contracts its work out to reforestation companies that violate state and federal safety, health and labor laws.

Matthes says it's only reasonable. "If somebody gets caught doing something wrong and they fix it, they're good," he said. "How can the federal government punish them? It's like society. If somebody's done their time, they deserve a fair shake again."

But others in the Forest Service said the agency has simply lost interest - again.

"We're not very good at managing things like this anymore," said Stan Bird, a veteran Forest Service contracting officer in John Day, Ore. "Years ago, it was important. But it's gotten lost in the midst of a lot of other priorities."

In the Klamath National Forest in California, federal law enforcement officer Jeff Brown worked a flurry of cases in the mid-'90s involving undocumented workers. Since then, Forest Service reforestation officials have not referred a single case to him. "In my opinion, the problem is still out there," Brown said. "It hasn't gone away."

Doing business through reforestation contractors allows the government and private timber companies to duck legal responsibility for workers. But the government often pays so little for jobs that contractors are forced to cut corners and put workers at risk, some industry veterans say.

"The forest industry takes reforestation workers for granted," said Dan Robertson, president of the Northwest Reforestation Contractors Association and one of the few insiders calling for reform. "They don't have a lot of concern about whether contractors are complying with all of the laws. As long as they think they are, they pretty much ignore it. And government is by far the worst."

Forests have always been risky places to work. Logging, in fact, is the most dangerous job in America, with a mortality rate of 92 workers per 100,000. Although thinning crowded stands of pine and fir is similar to logging, scant figures are available for Latino reforestation workers. But they are part of a deadly demographic tide: Latino laborers are 33 percent more likely to die on the job than other workers, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.


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On the west side of Medford, Ore., statistics are more than numbers in a report. They wear blue jeans and baseball caps and go to work in the woods. They speak little or no English, pack lunches of tortillas and beans and cash their paychecks not at banks but at Latino-owned convenience stores.

For a few weeks in 2004, Medford was home to Ricardo Ponce León, who had heard about the fistfuls of dollars that could be earned in America's forests. The son of a poor brick-maker from Michoacán, the 18-year-old hungered for prosperity and prestige.

"He wanted to be a don," said his father, Manuel Ponce. "He wanted the best the U.S. could offer."

It didn't work out that way. One morning, spraying brush-killing chemicals on private land across the border in California, Ponce hopped on a trailer for a ride to a new work site. The dual-axle trailer, carrying a heavy tank of liquid brush-killer, bumped and rattled down a dirt road. Ponce slipped, fell to the ground and was run over.

"I tried to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation," said one of his co-workers, who declined to identify himself out of fear of jeopardizing his job with Total Forestry Inc., the company that employed Ponce. "I could hear a sound coming from his chest, like a gurgling."

Ponce died a few minutes later - at 11:29 a.m. on Aug. 4, 2004. He had earned $13 an hour and been on the job 2 1/2 weeks. On July 31, he had wired $310 from his first paycheck to his mother in Mexico. The cause of death, according to the Shasta County Office of the Coroner, was "blunt force injuries" including "multiple abrasions and contusions of the head, torso and extremities."

The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health fined Total Forestry $9,075. But the company appealed and the fine is still pending. Reached by phone in his Redding office, Jeffrey Webster, the firm's president, declined to comment, then hung up. He did not respond to a written inquiry.

At Total's cramped office in a dreary industrial section of Medford, secretary Daisey Walker was also tight-lipped. "No comment," she told a Bee reporter. Pressed to say something, Walker added tersely, "What happened was horrible."

From his home in the dry hills outside Morelia, Mexico, Ponce's father has plenty to say.

"Nobody has given me any answers about what happened," he said. Growing angry, he exclaimed: "I want to know who killed my son!"

Ricardo Ponce León was covered by the State Compensation Insurance Fund, a quasi-public entity that compensates workers - documented or not - and their families for workplace injuries or death. But more than a year after the accident, Ponce's family has received no compensation - "ni un cinco," - not even five centavos, Manuel Ponce said.

Until The Bee began looking into Ponce's death this spring, even the California Division of Workers Compensation was not aware of it.

"Good Lord!" said Susan Gard, an information officer for the agency that monitors claims and resolves disputes between workers and insurance companies. "It just seems like they would have paid it. I can't explain why it's taken a year."

Now, the State Compensation Insurance Fund is taking a fresh look and - prodded by The Bee's reporting - hopes to make a payment to the Ponce family, according to the fund's spokesman.

Just seven months before Ponce's death, a Canadian panel cited "unacceptably high rates of deaths and serious injuries" among British Columbia's forest workers and called for sweeping changes to reduce them.

"Working in the woods involves inherent risks that cannot be completely eliminated," the Canadian Forest Safety Task Force reported. "This, however, does not justify the acceptance of unsafe behaviors and practices and the inevitability of thousands of injuries and deaths."

The task force's report, which covered reforestation workers as well as loggers, cited a litany of reasons for the crisis, including poor nutrition, inadequate training, fatigue, unsafe work habits, pressure to work quickly and a growing reliance on contractors - all factors documented in the detailed diaries of U.S. Forest Service job inspectors:

* From the Sierra National Forest, California - June 2003: "I noticed the crew was passing the chain saw along to cut brush. None of them were wearing chaps."

* From the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, California - July 2003: "2 guys knew how to thin, but the other three were rank beginners that did not know much about running a chain saw."

Such inexperience can cost workers dearly.

Stepping through the front door of his home in a backwater town in the San Joaquin Valley, Odilio Castro doesn't walk. He hobbles.

New to forest work, Castro took a job in the Sequoia National Forest last year, working for a forest contractor called Patty's Farm Labor of Strathmore.

"They never told me about the dangers of working around dead trees," Castro said.

Cutting through a small tree with a chain saw, he heard a rush of air as a larger dead tree, propped up by the small one, crashed to the ground, crushing him.

Face down in the dirt, he cried out for help. As co-workers rushed to his side and cut the tree into pieces to free him, he kept thinking: "I hope it's not bad. I hope it's not bad."

But it was. The calamity, Castro said, did more than crush his shoulder and mangle his leg. It shortchanged his future. "I can't do anything," he said. "I can't work. I can't bend over. I can't walk very much, not even to the corner."

The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health fined Patty's Farm Labor $20,845 for six violations of workplace safety law, including the failure to develop an injury prevention program.

Nonetheless, owner Patricia Soto said her company is committed to safety. "We provide training," she said. "We have safety meetings once a month."


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Even a history of safety problems does not bar a company from getting government work, state and federal records show. Since 1995, 3 J Reforestation has been inspected three times by the Oregon Occupational Safety and Health Division, cited for more than a dozen violations and fined repeatedly. Four workers have been hurt, including one in California.

Over the same period, the company was awarded government reforestation contracts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for work across Oregon and California. On one of those jobs, 3 J's owner, José Quezada, called up the Forest Service, worried about the safety of his workers.

As Chuck Sallander - a contracting officer's representative for the Siskiyou National Forest in Oregon - wrote in his work notes in 2004: "Contractor called me at home yesterday evening (and) had a concern voiced by his foreman. ... He said cutting material 12 inches (in diameter) was too dangerous for his crew. They weren't qualified. I agreed that I didn't want anybody hurt."

Sallander passed the concerns along to his supervisor, but they were rejected. "Contracting officer's decision is that contractor is required to cut trees up to 12 inches," Sallander noted.

Recently, Sallander explained the decision, saying that because the company's workers had been certified to work on forest fires - where big trees are cut - they could topple foot-thick timber, too. "It didn't wash," he said of Quezada's concerns. "He agreed and finished the contract."

The greatest dangers for pineros are not always the obvious ones. One of the riskiest jobs isn't cutting trees down - it's planting them in the ground, another Canadian report found.

"Planters typically cover 16 kilometers (9.6 miles) per day over difficult terrain," said the study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine in 2002. "In the process of planting, 20 percent will suffer a debilitating injury, a rate far in excess of the all-industry norm of five percent. ... Long-term implications for degeneration of the musculoskeletal system cannot be ignored."

Eladio Hernandez, a former Oregon tree planter, calls it "probably the hardest job in the world."

"Slopes are slippery," he said. "There's poison oak and ivy. Every day, you come back with a fever. It's that difficult. You either get used to it or quit."

The travails of tree planters are also spelled out in Forest Service work notes. "Very, very rocky. Planters seem to hit rocks with every swing," wrote one inspector for the Idaho Panhandle National Forest in 2003. Last year, weather was a problem. "It's pouring rain," the inspector wrote. "This may affect planting quality as it's quite miserable out."

Pressure is built into the job. If seedlings get too hot or dry, they die. If they're planted improperly, contractors are penalized financially, pineros are reprimanded and sometimes fired. Most planting is done in the spring when temperature swings are extreme.

"Most of the time you are going to be either cold and wet - or hot," said Larry Dawson, supervisor of the Clearwater National Forest in Idaho. "And you are going to be tired. Very often it's raining. Sometimes it's sleeting."

One morning in June, Modesto Alvarez, an undocumented tree planter from Honduras, pulled on work boots before dawn at the Budget Inn motel in Oroville and stepped into a van crowded with 13 other forest workers. Their destination: a tree-planting job in part of the Tahoe National Forest logged in the 1980s. But Alvarez was also headed for trouble.

Not far from Lake Spaulding, Alvarez strapped a bulging sack of seedlings to his hips and trudged across a gray, crumbly slope just below the snow line. Every few feet, he would stop, lift a silver-gray digging tool called a "hoedad" high into the air and slam it to the ground. Stooping over, he would take a seedling from his bag, plant it, tamp the dirt and move on.

Lift, slam, stoop, plant. Alvarez worked his way through puddles of shade and sun. Lift, slam, stoop, plant. A metallic clinking filled the air - the sound of hoedads striking rocks. Thirsty, Alvarez bent down and sipped from a snowmelt creek. The work was tough. But a Forest Service inspector watching the crew was making it tougher.

"She would just start yelling at us," Alvarez recounted during an interview in his home near Fresno. "Sometimes we'd pull a tree out of our bag - and accidentally drop one - and she would start yelling at us."

The inspector pressured the crew to plant in areas littered with rocks, something Alvarez considered risky. "To do what they tell us to do, that is how we get hurt," he said.

Swinging his hoedad one day around noon, Alvarez felt it come to a sudden stop on a rock torpedoed in the soil. The shock ricocheted up his arms. Arriving at the motel that evening, "I couldn't even step out of the van, I had to roll out," he said. "It was hard to breathe. It's a pain that won't go away."

Reached at her office, the Forest Service inspector, Carla Kempen, said she was not aware Alvarez had been hurt. She declined further comment.

"Carla is very demanding," said Oscar "William" Iraheta, foreman for Central Valley Forestry, the Exeter company that contracted with the government to plant the trees. "She insists the job be done exactly the way she wants it done. That's good for them. But for us - it's a lot more work."

Since that day, Alvarez has not worked in the woods. Nor has he received any compensation for the injury. Indeed he never submitted a claim, erroneously believing that because he is undocumented he would not qualify. He is now working in pain, his wife said, picking broccoli in the San Joaquin Valley.

"Up in the mountains, they rush us to do everything," Alvarez said. "But when we are hurt, they don't rush to help us."


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Nowhere is the lack of enforcement more obvious than in the laissez-faire attitude toward safety gear on the job - a dramatic contrast from most liability conscious American work sites.

State and federal laws require pineros to wear hard hats, cut-resistant chaps and boots, earplugs and face protection when they're thinning with chain saws. In the woods, the laws of the land are optional.

No one was paying attention to OSHA rules at a thinning job in the Bitterroot National Forest in Montana this fall where pineros scrambled across rugged mountain slopes, slashing away with chain saws and gathering trees and limbs into piles.

Most wore no eye or face protection, no earplugs. Several struggled for solid footing in the cheap boots they brought with them from Mexico. On slopes steep enough for skiing, they slipped. They slid. They stumbled.

"This company is not taking safety equipment seriously," said Gustavo Ferman DomÃÂ*nguez, one of the workers. "We have to buy our own gloves. They don't give us goggles for the chain saws. They don't give us boots."

Ferman pulled his own boots off to make a point. "Look at this!" he said, pointing to the soft toes, traction-free soles and a chain saw nick. He had just decided to quit. "It's not worth breaking a leg."

Manuel Burac, Universal's foreman, agreed the workers needed better footwear. "My view is the company should buy them boots," he said.

But safety goggles pose a problem because they fog up. "I haven't been using them myself," Burac said.

What about training? "There was no training," said Luis Andres Molina Hernández, a pinero working for Burac. "They just asked: 'Which one of you guys know how to use a chain saw?' "

Burac was sympathetic, but added that his company routinely hires inexperienced forest workers, making his job more difficult. "I feel the company should be better training all the workers when they get here," he said.

Emergency medical gear was missing, too. When Eliseo DomÃÂ*nguez was hurt one morning, struck below the eye by a branch while cutting a tree without safety goggles, there was no first aid within miles.

The van used to rush the worker to a hospital was littered with empty soda bottles, yogurt cups, a canteen, a deck of cards, a bandana, a rain slicker - everything, it seemed, but a first-aid kit. "Someone cleaned the van out one day," said Felix Rodriguez, the Universal employee who drove to the emergency room that day. "And they took it."

The morning Carlos Valdez was blinded in his right eye in the Tahoe National Forest in 2002, safety gear was an issue, too. "He was not wearing his goggles," said Francisco Acevedo, owner of the company doing the work, Redding Tree Growers.

Valdez, though, remembers it differently. "They did not have goggles," he said. "They were not available to me."

Rosie Lopez, who manages safety matters for the company, said ensuring workers wear safety gear is the foreman's job. But she added:

"Some workers decline to use it. They have their rights, too, you know. They have the option and the right to decline what to wear and not to wear."

By law, all serious injuries must be reported to the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health within eight hours. But Valdez's wasn't.

"We have no record of it," said Dean Fryer, a spokesman for the agency. "Without doubt, we should have been notified."

In Oregon, Dan Robertson, the reforestation contractor association president, said underreporting of injuries is widespread. He sees the proof when his own injured workers come to him for advice.

"A lot of guys who come here have never been through a workers' compensation claim," said Robertson, the owner of Professional Reforestation Inc. on the Oregon coast. "And they've been hurt before. You have to explain everything."

Reforestation contractors "aren't reporting their injuries," he said. "They will report the bad ones, you see, because they don't want to pay for it. And they will pay for the minor ones out of their pocket to keep their (insurance) rates down."

Redding Tree Growers did inform its insurance company about Valdez, who is receiving a disability payment of $371 per week from the insurer. But Rosie Lopez said she didn't know she was required to tell the state. "I was not aware I was supposed to report it," she said.

Tahoe forest officials weren't notified, either. "Unless we see it or someone informs us, there's not any reason we would know,' said Henry Hansen, a contracting officer for the Tahoe National Forest. "It's the contractor's worker and the contractor's responsibility."

After the accident, Valdez prayed often. "I'd get down on my knees and say, 'Please God. I don't want to lose my eye. Please, save my eye.' " At night, asleep, he'd dream he could see.

Twenty-three when he was hurt - now 26 - Valdez said those dreams have faded. But the consequences of living with one eye have not. He lives by himself in a trailer, working as a janitor for a local church, where he also sings in the choir.

"I'm scared," he said. "There are things I'd like to do that I am not able to. I'd like to work in construction - but I can't. I'd like to play ball, but I can't catch the ball the way I used to. Nothing, not even $100,000, can replace an eye."


About the writer:
The Bee's Tom Knudson can be reached at (530) 582-5336 or tknudson@sacbee.com.