Forest guest workers tell of abuses

Tom Knudson -- Bee Staff Writer
Published Friday, May 19, 2006

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- As President Bush pushes for an expanded guest worker program, the plight of Latino forest guest workers took a quiet but significant turn on Thursday when two former guest workers from Guatemala came to the nation's Capitol to tell their stories of mistreatment.

Appearing at a congressional briefing with Rep. Joe Baca, D-Rialto, the two brothers gave harrowing accounts of coming to the United States as legal guest workers only to encounter bleak and dangerous conditions on national forest and private timberland. They said their wages were diminished by payroll deductions and overtime that was never paid.

Baca organized the briefing to renew his call for an oversight hearing to examine the treatment of the workers and the government's role in hiring the contractors that employ them -- a request he made earlier this year before the House Agriculture Committee. With Republicans in charge of Congress, Democrats cannot call hearings themselves.

"Republicans set the agenda," Baca said. "It seems like it's fallen on deaf ears. And yet, people are being hurt. People are being abused."

Both men who spoke Thursday ended up injured. One nearly lost his thumb to an infected cut. The other gashed his knee with a hoe-like tool called a "hoedad" and said he lay in the woods bleeding for hours while a company foreman did nothing.

"The company did not care about my health," said Leonel Hernandez-Lopez, 39, speaking in Spanish through an interpreter. The injury took a month to heal, Hernandez said, and while recovering he received no disability benefits.

Last November, a series of Sacramento Bee articles about the mistreatment of legal forest workers, "The Pineros: Men of the Pines," drew rapid promises of reform from the Forest Service.

Since then the Bush administration has accelerated its push for increasing guest worker permits -- which number about 66,000 for non-agricultural jobs ranging from forest worker to landscaper to maid. Indeed, expanding the guest worker program has become a linchpin of the administration's immigration reform proposal.

Under the program, employers who can't find enough U.S. workers apply to bring in foreigners legally, mostly from Mexico and Central America. But the process is fraught with trouble.

In their home countries workers often find themselves borrowing heavily to pay recruiting, travel, visa and other costs. Once in the United States, they may end up working under dangerous conditions, with little or no training or protective gear and being charged for tools, housing, gas and other items -- a situation the Guatemalan men recounted at Thursday afternoon's briefing.

"All the expenses were mine; I was never reimbursed," said Enrique Napoleon Hernandez-Lopez, who said he borrowed $1,600 at 10 percent interest for a recruiting fee and other costs.

"I felt a lot of pressure because of that debt," he said, "and was unable to earn enough money in my time here to pay off that debt."

The briefing was attended by several congressional staff members, including two from the office of George Miller, D-Martinez, whose own request for an oversight hearing has gone unheeded since November.

"When President Bush spoke on immigration the other day, he said we are a nation of laws and we must enforce our laws," Miller said in a statement read by his legislative assistant after the briefing.

"But in the case of the pineros, the laws are just not being enforced. If the president wants to move toward a bigger guest worker program, first he needs to protect the workers who are already here."

The workers who spoke Thursday were brought to the briefing by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama firm that has filed four class action lawsuits against forest contractors.

Mary Bauer, director of the center's immigrant justice project, said she believes the problem is widespread.

"We didn't choose this industry lightly," she said. "We chose this industry because we believe these may be the most exploited workers in the nation."

Larry Stine, an Atlanta attorney for the forest contractors sued by Bauer's firm, said she and others "are overstating the case to a considerable degree."

Each of his clients, he added, has been inspected in recent years by the Department of Labor and found to be in substantial compliance. "You tell me why some of these companies have workers coming up here 12 or 13 years in a row if this is such an economically repressive system," Stine said.

At Thursday's briefing, the brothers told of rising early, starting tree planting around 6 a.m. and continuing until nightfall.

"We pretty much always worked 60 hours a week," said Leonel Hernandez-Lopez. Yet when payday arrived "the checks would always come for 40 hours. We never received any overtime."

Stark as the men's stories were, at least they could tell them. Sandi Belmain, a certified nursing assistant from Maine, showed up to speak for one who could not: Carlos Izaguirre, the foreman who died along with 13 other guest workers in a van accident in Maine four years ago -- the worst non-fire-related forest tragedy in U.S. history. All told, at least 23 forest workers have died in transportation accidents across the country since 2002.

Belmain, Izaguirre's sister-in-law, was so distraught she broke down and left the briefing in tears. Later, sitting alone, she managed a few words.

Even before the fatal accident, she said, the men were "treated horribly," she said. "They had to pay for their equipment, gas" and other expenses, she said.

"In all honesty, I don't think it's worth working," Belmain added. "I don't think it's worth wasting their time to come to the country. I don't see how they would ever get ahead."

While political realities make future hearings unlikely, Baca said he plans to push ahead on other fronts -- by calling on the secretary of labor to make seat belts mandatory for every forest worker riding in a van, urging the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to step up its enforcement in the field and demanding that the Forest Service crack down on problem contractors and work more closely with the Labor Department.

About the writer: