Author Hal Hartzell (left, with Jerry Rust) was a founding member of the Hoedads, a tree-planting cooperative. Photo courtesy Hal Hartzell
I was reading about the plight of the piñeros in a series of articles that appeared in the Sacramento Bee a couple of months ago. The piñeros are Hispanic woods workers who find employment in the United States under the guest worker program. According to the series, the reason guest workers are here is so that they can do work that Americans don’t want to do. The articles stressed the horrors faced by Hispanic guest workers, due primarily to the greed of contractors who keep them in more or less constant economic and physical peril.
My first reaction was “what’s new?” Unscrupulous contractors have been ripping off workers since at least the early seventies, which is when my experiences in the woods began. To my knowledge there was no guest worker program then, and the Hispanic workers were either legal or illegal; both groups lacked rights and were exploited through fear and ignorance. Sometimes at the end of the contract the contractor himself would call up the immigration department and have the crew busted and sent home—sans paychecks.
Back in those days, unscrupulous contractors would overcharge everybody for food, lodging and transportation, and sometimes disappear before the final checks or bonuses were due. The hippies could sue, but the poor illegals had absolutely no recourse whatsoever. If they complained they were thrown in jail and shipped back to Mexico. But these sorts of transgressions are a product of the age-old relations between haves and have-nots, owners and workers, and are not necessarily related to the rigors of working in the woods.
It’s been a while since I worked in the woods. I was able to plant a half-million trees in seven states during my twenty-year career. There are planters from both sides of the border who put more than a million in the ground during their careers. I worked as a crew boss and inspector for several more years after my tree-planting days were over. It’s not as bad as it sounds. We got to live, camp and play in the beautiful Northwest even while we worked in the clear-cuts, which often resembled burning war zones. And it was more than just tree planting; it was adventure, and a cultural experience. We had women on our crews in those days, working side by side on the slopes. We liked the hard work. We liked being in the mountains, fishing in the streams, or soaking in the hot springs in the dead of winter. We liked the small-town stores and playing in the taverns. Tree planting is hard work, no doubt about it—but it can also be fun.
The most succinct statement on the rigors of tree planting that I ever read was a State Employment Office bulletin that I saw pinned to the wall in Eugene, Oregon, in 1973. It was so counter-productive to their mission, which was to get people to work, that I had to copy it down.
“It is the hardest physical work known to this office. The most comparative physical requirement is that of a five-mile cross-mountain run, daily. If all body joints are in very good condition, a person has excellent persistence and at four-and-a-half miles of your self-trial run, you know you can do it, and can persuade the foreman, you may make it the three weeks it takes to really learn how to be a team member on a planting crew…. Of those who adequately persist to get on the two-hour crummy ride for a trial, one person in fifty succeeds for the three-week training period. It actually is a good job for some.”
It didn’t even mention the forty-pound tree bags or the 60 percent slopes, or the often-inclement “sideways” weather. No wonder nobody up here wants to do the work. No wonder everybody looks the other way when workers from south of the border come in to do it, legal or not.
Without belittling the suffering of many piñeros, I do know that quite a few workers, Hispanic or not, are making pretty good lives by working up here in the woods. In fact I am told that many of the contractors in Oregon are Hispanic. Due to the 8a set-aside program, which allows for non-competitive contract awards to new minority businesses, many Hispanic contractors have been able to develop sizable companies. The set-aside program is a good deal for minority contractors and for Hispanic workers because it allows them to negotiate contracts at a good price, which means the contractor can afford to train people and increase the number of his crews while paying a decent wage to the professionals that work for him. He can also include a sizeable profit.
Other contractors, whether legitimate or unscrupulous, can’t do that. They are pressured to get as much as they possibly can out of their crews—and give out as little as they possibly can—in order to survive. The competition for tree planting contracts is huge and the underhanded practices of some contractors, especially those who are exploiting unsuspecting piñeros, make it nearly impossible for legitimate contractors to win work.
There are two factors of concern for contractors: speed and quality. The faster a crew can plant quality trees, the better it works. A fast crew that plants lousy trees (trees that won’t pass inspection) might not get paid at all, or might get paid only a percentage of the bid price. A quality planting crew that plants slowly won’t make any money either. So a fast, quality planter is a valuable person to have on the crew.
The math is simple: if a worker plants 1000 good trees—trees that pass inspection—in a day, that equals approximately two-and-a-half acres. If the bid price was $100 per acre, then that planter has earned $250 for the contractor. If the contractor pays that worker $128 (sixteen dollars an hour for eight hours’ work), then the contractor nets $122. If a rookie plants 400 trees at 75 percent inspection then it’s a different story. The rookie plants the equivalent of one acre at $100, but at the low inspection it’s only paid seventy-five dollars. If the contractor has to pay a minimum wage of $100 (twelve dollars and fifty cents an hour for an eight-hour day) for work that only grosses seventy-five dollars, he obviously can’t do that for very long.
A distinction should be made between government and private work in regards to minimum wages, inspections and reporting habits. Private companies can let their work go for minimum wage, whereas the government has considerably higher rates established. Private companies can be fairly lax on their inspections, while the government can be painfully strict on theirs. It’s easier to train rookies on private contracts because there is more leeway on wages and inspections. But the bottom line is the same whether government or private: every group wants to get the most work for the least dollars. This makes it tough for legitimate contractors to compete.
Even though the boom in reforestation is over, there still seems to be plenty of room for guest workers who are willing to work hard. I’m happy for them, but I’m a little worried about us. Where are the people from this country who like to work hard? Where are the people who want to experience the beauty of the Northwest up close and personal? I think that they are still out there, but because of the nature of contracting, it is tough for young, local people to get started.
Because I have been out of the tree-planting business for more than ten years, I asked a few friends of mine, some Hispanic, what they thought was going on out there in the woods today. They agreed that the young men coming up from south of the border who have no experience with woods work or with living in the United States were the ones who were most susceptible to being ripped off by predatory contractors. This is indeed happening, but it’s probably more rampant in the South.
But for the most part, Hispanic workers in the Northwest who do know how to plant or thin trees, build trails, or otherwise work on a professional level are in very high demand. In fact it’s a win–win situation for contractors and professional workers to develop long-term relationships. If the contractor treats people right, both economically and in terms of general respect for their value as workers, and if he can keep them working year-round, then the word gets out. The good planters hear through community and family connections where they will be well treated and pretty soon the contractor has a whole crew, and then another, and another.
I still don’t know what to do about the bad guys—the ones that keep ripping people off. Maybe the government should crack down on them instead of on workers who might not have exactly the right papers. Maybe the contracting system should be changed so it doesn’t end up exacerbating the situation in regards to rip-off contractors because of the pressure for low-price work. I do hope that eventually each piñero will find the right contractor who understands his value as a potential well-trained worker. Working in the woods will always be hard, and because of the terrain and distances traveled on mountain roads, it will always be relatively dangerous. But with proper training, safe vehicles and drivers, decent gear and a good attitude about hard work, working in the woods can be a great job—for some.