By Michael Doyle -- Bee Washington Bureau
Published Thursday, February 23, 2006
WASHINGTON - California contractors that hire Latino forest workers will face increased scrutiny this spring as part of an intensified campaign to crack down on abuses, Labor Department officials said Wednesday.
Officials working out of Sacramento plan to conduct 10 to 15 "directed investigations" targeting forest contractors throughout the state. The complex and time-consuming investigations are prompted by industry-wide problems rather than complaints filed about specific contractors.
"Forestry investigations are some of the most complicated investigations that we have," David Minsky, chief of staff for the Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division, said at a Capitol Hill briefing. "The workers tend to be fearful of government, and we don't get many complaints from them."
Beneath the surface, though, the problems are manifold for the workers called pineros - men of the pines. Shabby housing, dangerous work conditions, low pay and fatally bad transportation bedevil the roughly 10,000 Latino forest workers employed under the H2B visa program.
The investigations, each taking an average of 100 hours, will cover roughly half of the California contractors hiring the H2B forest workers and will be in addition to any other investigation launched in response to a formal complaint.
The Labor Department began quietly planning its new "directed investigation" of the industry in April, Minsky said at the briefing for congressional staffers. But officials acknowledged Wednesday that the 90-minute briefing itself, as well as some of the other agency and congressional efforts now under way, come in response to a Bee investigation published in November. "They surfaced particularly in The Sacramento Bee," Ron Hooper, the Forest Service's director of acquisition management, said of the H2B problems, adding that the series was "justifiably critical of some of the conditions that have been observed."
No other states were mentioned for new "directed investigations" by the officials Wednesday.
The late afternoon briefing was hosted by the House Resources Committee, which handles forestry issues. While the House panel has not yet scheduled a hearing into the plight of the pineros, the Senate subcommittee on public lands and forests has scheduled a hearing for March 1.
Some reforms already have been put in place, Hooper said. For instance, the old contracts did not explicitly spell out the various requirements that labor contractors must meet for housing, transportation, safety equipment and so on. Instead, those references were indirect. The new contracts will identify the standards in black and white.
With the contractors now on notice about the specific health and safety requirements, Forest Service officials say they will be able to suspend work when they find serious shortcomings.
"We're no longer going to sit back and observe violations and do nothing about them," Hooper said. "We have to look out for these workers on the forest like we look out for own employees."
For its part, the Labor Department has developed bilingual "worker-rights" cards for distribution to the forest workers, and the department is also mulling a Spanish-language public service announcement to run on radio.
Seminars already have been introducing the forest contractors to their responsibilities. The California Highway Patrol, for instance, has been advising contractors on transportation requirements.
Federal agencies also are trying to improve their coordination, as the Forest Service has delivered to the Labor Department a list of all the contractors so they might be invited to briefings.
Bureaucratic imperfections linger, though. Some congressional staffers questioned Wednesday why Labor Department officials shouldn't have immediate access to a newly created Forest Service database identifying contractors who violate federal standards. Officials conceded Wednesday that kind of information-sharing makes sense and indicated they would look into it.
To read The Bee's investigation about the pineros, see www.sacbee.com/pineros
About the writer:
- The Bee's Michael Doyle can be reached at (202) 383-0006 or mdoyle@mcclatchydc.com.