Contractors rip rivals for pineros' plight

A U.S. Senate panel takes up wage and safety issues today.

By Tom Knudson -- Bee Staff Writer
Published Wednesday, March 1, 2006

Carrying bottles of gasoline, oil and water, and a chain saw, Mauricio Ontiveros follows co-workers into the Tahoe National Forest in Yuba County. Sacramento Bee file, 2005/Hector Amezcua

On the eve of a Senate hearing about the abuse of Latino forest workers on U.S. Forest Service land, some of the strongest calls for reform are coming from those who know the business best: the forest contractors themselves.

These contractors - who hire workers and compete for forest maintenance jobs from Georgia to Alaska - blame problems in their industry on a few bad actors empowered by bureaucratic neglect and a low-bid government contracting system.

"Unsafe working practices. Undocumented workers. Atrocious living conditions," said Eric Helpenstell, director of operations for Pacific Wildfire, an Idaho firm. "It's hard to compete with that."

In California, Chico-based contractor Jim Wills recently closed his Quincy office after being underbid for Forest Service jobs by an Oregon company with a history of labor violations involving Latino workers.

"I'm bummed," Wills said last week in Quincy. "We've been a part of this community since 1998."

Until recently, such struggles have gone largely unnoticed. But as legislative interest increases in the wake of a November Bee series - "The Pineros: Men of the Pines," which drew attention to wage exploitation and hazardous working and transportation conditions in the industry - the contractors' perspectives are gaining traction.

"We've never had a venue," Helpenstell said. "Even to call your senators and congressmen - this is such a niche market. They've got a lot of bigger things to fry."

Today, Washington takes official notice with the first congressional hearing on the topic scheduled before the Senate public lands and forests subcommittee.

The hearing adds to action already taken by Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth, who ordered his agency to rewrite its labor contracts to clearly identify violations of workplace law and told employees to be more alert for signs of trouble.

The Department of Labor also is stepping up its oversight of the industry.

Contractors say those changes won't go far enough. To weed out wage abuse, substandard housing, hazardous travel and on-the-job injury and death, they say the government must dramatically step up its field-level enforcement, more rigorously scrutinize contractor payrolls and award less work to low bidders.

The Forest Service maintains it does not automatically choose the lowest bids but instead selects contracts that offer the best value. But contractor after contractor reported losing jobs to bids so low they necessitate shortchanging workers.

Contracting out forest work on the cheap "promotes the abuse of this kind of labor," said Mike Wheelock, owner of Grayback Forestry, a veteran forest contractor in Oregon. Companies "charge (workers) for food and housing. They pay under the table. They manipulate the hours."

In its report, The Bee found that even those 10,000 or so pineros who labor legally in the U.S. as so-called guest workers are vulnerable. Over the past decade, they have been shorted hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid wages, federal records show.

Many violations also go unreported because workers won't speak up. For them, making less than the legal wage of about $15 an hour for forest labor on government contracts "is better than making $8 a day in their homeland," said Wills, the California contractor. "That's the problem; that's the exploitation."

Contractors say there is a solution: Require that payrolls be inspected and certified as accurate.

"That would take care of so much," Helpenstell said. With certified payrolls, the Forest Service "would be able to equate man-hours in the field with what contractors actually pay."

The Labor Department's current plan to step up enforcement is both a positive sign and a concern, contractors said.

"Our biggest fear is we are going to get hammered," said Cindy Wood, owner of Wood's Fire and Emergency Service in Plumas County.

"It's the noncompliant companies we are trying to get the agencies to rope in," said Wood, who is among those scheduled to testify today before the Senate subcommittee. "We already have regulations and laws in place. We just need to make sure they get implemented."

In the past, companies that violated wage and safety laws have had no trouble landing Forest Service jobs, the Bee reported last year. Many win the government contracts over and over again.

"If they checked businesses out prior to making an award - checked their business practices and safety records - they wouldn't have unsophisticated contractors out there creating problems," said Rick Dice, president of the National Wildfire Suppression Association, which represents companies that bid for Forest Service jobs.

A dozen years ago, the agency did just that, through a 264-page "Reforestation Workers Information Data Base" - a detailed account of contractor violations. It later dropped that approach in favor of using more general information from the Department of Labor.

The Forest Service is now reassembling an in-house databank to respond to Bosworth's concerns.

"Documented violations must be a factor in evaluating future bids and awarding future contracts," Bosworth wrote in a November memo to top agency officials.

The agency's move comes too late for Wills, who has recently lost some Forest Service jobs in Northern California to Oregon-based, Summitt Forests Inc., whose troubled history is clear in even a cursory read of the old agency database:

* Undocumented workers violations, 1992, 1994 and 1997.

* Department of Labor wage violations, 1991, 1993, 1995.

More recently, Summitt has been cited for other infractions, including Labor Department overtime violations in 2000 and Occupational Safety and Health Administration violations in 2005.

Nonetheless, data from the Federal Procurement Data System - an online inventory of federal contracts - shows Summitt has been awarded more than $10 million in Forest Service and other federal agency contracts around the West over the past five years. Since 2003, it has received more than $2.5 million for thinning, hand-piling and other jobs on the Plumas National Forest alone.

That California work has not been trouble-free, according to agency field notes kept by Plumas National Forest contract officials and obtained by the Bee:

11-23-03: One of the contractor's vans is on site apparently disabled (motor oil on ground and surrounding area). Van license plate - Oregon ... ."

11-17-04: One of the cutters was cut with a chain saw and was taken to Eastern Plumas District Hospital in Portola.

Wills, of Firestorm Wildland Fire Suppression Inc., claims he has lost jobs to Summitt at rates far below his cost of doing business. "They are able to underbid us by thousands and thousands of dollars. They come in so quick, they swarm the jobs - making it impossible for (Forest Service) contract inspectors to do thorough inspections."

Scott Nelson, Summitt's president, did not return calls seeking comment.

Plumas National Forest supervisor Jim Peña had no complaints about the company. "The work they have done for us has been acceptable, and we have had no performance problems with them that I am aware of," Peña said.

Much of the work Wills lost to Summitt was for forest jobs under the Herger-Feinstein Quincy Library Group Recovery Act - landmark legislation approved by Congress in 1998 to strike a balance between the economic needs of a wildfire-threatened community and concerns about the environmental impact of forest management and logging.

Last week, Wills presented his concerns to the Quincy Library Group, the citizen organization that lobbied for the law and monitors its implementation.

Most in attendance were sympathetic.

"What disturbs me is the Forest Service passing it off as not their problem, and yet they are participating in it," said Linda Blum, a founding - and sometimes fiery - Quincy Library Group member. "It disturbs me that they are awarding contracts where the dollar amount clearly does not cover fair labor practices."

But Peña, in a separate interview, said his responsibility "is to make sure the government gets full value, or a fair value, for the work it is contracting for. And it's irresponsible on my part, I think, to pay more than the going price."

Kurt Winchester, a Forest Service official who oversees the Quincy Library Group project, listened calmly to Blum's comments. The agency is responding to the issue, he said, but change takes time.

"This isn't getting swept under the carpet," Winchester said. Forest Service Chief Bosworth "has got interest in it. We all know the Queen Mary doesn't turn on a dime."

"Irrelevant!" Blum shot back. "The Queen Mary is irrelevant."

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