Imported labor Foreigners recruited for jobs in the Maine woods that American workers find undesirable

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TOWNSHIP 8, RANGE 8 – For two years, Henry Ordonez has come thousands of miles from his home in Honduras to thin trees in the woods of northern Maine in hopes of making enough money to send his two children to college. Such an education is a rarity for all but upper class families in the impoverished Central American country.

Roberto Mendez hopes to use the money he earns this summer to open a small shop in his native Guatemala. As the youngest of eight children, he also supports his aged parents and other family members.

If he stayed home in Mexico rather than coming to Maine to work in the woods, Walter Hernandez Ramon would only be able to find odd jobs and could not earn enough money to live.

The three men, brought to Maine by Ramon Forestry Service, were part of a 16-man crew cutting 12-foot-tall trees this week on land owned by J.D. Irving Ltd., in far northwestern Penobscot County about 20 miles west of the village of Oxbow. A quarter of a mile from a one-lane track off the main logging road, through thickets and over cut and fallen trees, the whir of saws was the only hint that the men were at work nearby thinning the forest.

Clad in sweatshirts and jackets to ward off bugs and injuries from the saws and falling timber, they use brush saws – oversized weed whackers fitted with circular blades – to cut down weak and undesirable evergreens to enable the ones left behind to grow faster and bigger. The smallest are hacked away by hand with a machete to avoid damaging prized species. Some acres of forest are covered with 30,000 small trees. The ideal is to leave about 1,000 white pine, spruce or balsam firs behind.

The Oxbow crew is a small portion of the 1,200 foreign workers brought to Maine this year to trim Maine timberland. They suddenly entered the public consciousness last week when 14 of them were killed when the van they were riding in drove off a bridge in the Allagash Wilderness Waterway and plunged into 15 feet of water. One man survived. That crew, which worked for Evergreen Forestry Services, was on its way from Caribou to do work on land owned by Pingree Associates and managed by Seven Islands Land Co.

Scarce workers

Until a decade ago, thinning – the most menial and physically taxing of forestry work – was done by local people. However, Americans no longer want to do the job, said Chuck Gadzik, a former director of the Maine Forest Service who now oversees Irving’s 1.5 million acres of timberland in Maine.

“I did some thinning in my younger days,” Gadzik said. “It is monotonous and tiring work.

“The rate we’d have to pay to get people to do the work at 3 percent unemployment [in Maine] would not be economically feasible,” he said. It costs his company as much to thin an acre of land as it does to buy one, Gadzik said.

So, companies like Irving and Seven Islands have turned to foreign labor.

At first, the majority of the workers came from Mexico. Now they typically come from even poorer Honduras and Guatemala, where many villages lack electricity and running water. Men who work in the Maine woods hope to run water pipes to their homes, replace dirt floors with concrete and, in some cases, build new homes.

Honduras has the second-lowest standard of living in the Western Hemisphere, and the average annual income there is $850. Conditions in Guatemala are not much better, where the average income is $1,690.

Ramon pays these foreign woods workers a minimum of $10.49 per hour, which is about the industry standard. They can make more if they are paid by the acre. If they work more than 40 hours a week, they must be paid overtime by federal law.

Companies decide each year how many acres need to be thinned. For Irving, it’s about 11,000 acres. Then they solicit bids from a variety of contractors to get the work done. The companies that bid on the work range from large national entities like Idaho-based Evergreen, which brought 354 foreign workers to Maine this year, to smaller outfits like Ramon Forestry, which employs 50 people and is based in Clinton.

The contractors are paid $160 to $200 an acre for the thinning work, depending on how thick the forest is and whether the work meets Irving’s standards, Gadzik said. That’s more than twice what the contractors pay workers for thinning an acre of land.

It is then up to the contractors, not the landowners, to find people to do the work. To hire foreign workers, the companies must show the U.S. Department of Labor they are unable to find American workers. They are then certified by the department to hire a set number of foreigners to do temporary work in the woods.

The men who work in the forest are issued H2B visas to work for a specific company. Nationally, 66,000 workers can be brought into the country for this purpose, although the timber companies are lobbying Congress to increase that number. These visas differ from those issued to migrant farmworkers, who can move around the country and work for different employers.

The system doesn’t always work the way it is supposed to.

Coming to America

The men who are hired often incur large debts at exorbitant interest rates before they leave their home countries. They sometimes pay up to $5,000 to obtain a visa, said Priscilla Doel, a Spanish professor at Colby College who first learned about Hispanic workers in the Maine woods when she translated for one who was being held in the Somerset County Jail.

She has since set up a nonprofit group to help the men whom she calls the “forgotten people” because much more attention has been focused on migrant farmworkers.

Many must also pay for their airfare to the United States and buy their own saws, which cost $900, and other equipment, Doel said. In addition, the men pay their own rent and buy their own food, and many, like those killed in the accident, are charged to ride in a van to and from the work site.

“There is an argument to be made that H2B workers are akin to indentured servants,” said Mike Guare, an attorney with Pine Tree Legal Assistance’s Farmworker Unit in Bangor. Because of the workers’ special visa status, federally funded groups like Pine Tree cannot represent the men.

“If your only choice is to stay in a country where you can’t feed your family, you’re willing to put up with a lot of abuse,” Guare added.

While the men working on the Ramon crew near Oxbow all said they did not have to buy their own equipment or pay to ride in the company van, some said they did have to pay for their own transportation to the United States.Mendez, 22, said he left Guatemala in great debt. Through a translator, he related how he had to pay what amounted to a bribe for a visa and spent another $700 for a flight to America. In addition, he was told he had to have $200 in his pocket upon his arrival.

Mendez originally was brought to Georgia by a man he only knew as “Mr. Jerry.” He was only there for two days before he was told there was no work and was given the phone number of Ramon Forestry Service in Maine. He and another Guatemalan then came here to work.

At the end of September, Mendez expected he had earned $3,000 in Maine and that his more than $2,000 in debt had been paid off.

However, at this rate, the young man, clad in a patterned polyester shirt, work pants and black rubber boots, acknowledged his dream of opening a shop in his hometown of La Libertad, would be a long time in coming.

This was his first year in Maine, and Mendez expected he’d be back. His family lives in poverty in northern Guatemala, where they own a small plot of land to cultivate coffee, corn and beans.

“What else can we do?” he asked.

Hard work

Baraquiel Herrera has worked in Maine for four years. He keeps coming here because he cannot earn enough money to support his wife and three children in Veracruz, Mexico.

“You work hard there and you don’t earn enough. Here, you work hard and you do earn enough,” he said through a translator.

Many of the foreign workers who come to Maine’s woods are relatives or are from the same village.

Asked if he would tell friends and family members to come here to work, Herrera hesitated before saying: “If you can stay in the country, it’s much better, but if you need to work, yes, you should come here.”

Herrera said the working conditions were good and that the bosses did not “scold or yell” at them. The men do have to work extra hours if they miss work because it rains or they arrive late.

He said he had not seen any injuries in his four years, but that if a worker is sick, the company will take him to a doctor.

It was unclear after talking to several men how much they were actually paid and if they were paid overtime.

The crew foreman, Alfonso Carate, who is also from Veracruz, now has a green card enabling him to have more freedom traveling and working in the country. He said the workers will at least make $10 an hour, but that they usually chose to be paid by the acre because they can make more money that way. They are paid between $75 and $80 an acre and can thin at least an acre a day with the 40-pound saws, Carate said. Sometimes they thin 11/2 acres or, rarely, 2.

The thinning work is checked by a member of the crew to ensure that enough trees have been cut. If not, the worker must go back and cut some more. Then, an Irving employee surveys sample plots to check that the right number of trees are left behind and that they are not damaged. The contractor is paid based on the quality of the work that is done.

The men arrive at the job site at 7 a.m. in a dusty company van and begin emerging from the thick woods at 3 p.m. They work every day except Saturday. That is when they call their families.

The entire crew lives in a rented two-story house in Portage for which they pay $550 a month. The house is about a 11/2 hour drive from where they are working now. Although there are not enough beds for all 16 men, they make do, they said, adding that a two-story house is big.

In their off-hours, they mostly sleep, the men said. Sometimes they watch television or rented movies. The foreman does the grocery shopping and sometimes takes them to Presque Isle where they like to go the Wal-Mart and Marden’s to look around, he said. Their only source of transportation is the company van, which can only be driven by the foreman.

Sometimes they even drink a beer and dance, said Rosalino Estrada, a Mexican who, at 49, is the oldest in the crew.

The men said they have almost no contact with anyone outside their crew because they do not know English, although some hope to learn.

Rising through the ranks

The company the men work for, Ramon Forestry Service, is unusual in that it is owned by a man who first came to this country on an H2B visa in 1988. Just like the men he now employs, Baldemar Ramon came to the United States from his native Mexico to thin and plant trees. He worked for Evergreen Forestry Services in the south before coming to Maine. He became a supervisor with another company and then decided to strike out on his own in 1996.

“I saw how to do the work and decided to start my own company,” said Ramon, wearing a white T-shirt and gold chains around his wrists and neck and standing in front of his shiny blue Dodge pickup truck.

When he came to America, he knew no English. He bought books and slowly taught himself.

Now 38, he is married to a woman from Caribou. They have two daughters and live in Clinton.

Ramon helps support his mother and father in Tabasco, Mexico, and helps out others there as well.

Ramon said his workers can get a paycheck of $400 to $500 a week. He pays them $80 an acre, he said, so they will be sure to make more than the guaranteed $10.40 an hour minimum.

He said he provides transportation and equipment, although when he worked, he had to buy his own saw. The men pay their own way to Maine.

He recruits workers largely by word of mouth. He said he does have a lawyer in Guatemala who recruits people. They are told the work is hard, Ramon said.

The workers train one another so those who are new to the job can soon work as quickly as the experienced hands. One member of each crew has first-aid training.

He said he wants his workers to do a good job so they can continue working for Irving.

“Once I do not do a good job, Irving will say no more and then I will not have a business and I will not have jobs for them,” Ramon said.

There is much paperwork involved in running his business, Ramon said shaking his head. The payroll is very complicated, he said, because it must show how many hours were worked and how many acres were cut.

He said the U.S. Department of Labor never used to show up to review his records. Now they come every year.

Outside review

Unlike most other landowners in Maine, the use of foreign workers on Irving’s land has been scrutinized by independent auditors. A third of the company’s ownership in Maine, 550,000 acres, has been certified as “well-managed” by the Forest Stewardship Council, an independent group based in Mexico. In addition to reviewing forestry practices, FSC standards require companies to meet social criteria, including maintaining good employee and contractor relations.

As part of their review, auditors interviewed 15 workers and two supervisors in Spanish in 1999. They reported that worker morale was high and that most of the men were glad to have the opportunity to work on the Irving lands and to be paid the then-prevailing wage of $10.09 an hour.

Most of the men sent much of their salary home to support their families, and this was an important contribution to the local economies back home, the reviewers wrote.

The auditors did note the situation was complicated by the fact that U.S. labor laws “hinder the ability of [Irving] to supervise independent contractors in great detail.”

Who’s responsible?

The timber companies should take more responsibility for foreign workers and their treatment, said Greg Schell, an attorney for the Migrant Farmworkers Justice Project in West Palm Beach, Fla. His group has filed three class-action lawsuits seeking to make International Paper Co. and Georgia-Pacific Corp. ensure that foreign workers who plant trees and cut brush on their land are properly paid.

The suits seek millions of dollars in back wages for hundreds of workers, including some who did work for International Paper Corp. in Maine. The case was dismissed by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida. Schell’s group has appealed that decision to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. A hearing is scheduled for December.

Schell said the companies do not pay the contractors enough to plant and thin the trees, so in turn the men doing the work are not paid enough. The companies are paying the same prices per acre as they did 20 years ago, he said. In the intervening years, expenses for the contractors have increased. This prompts contractors to “grossly underestimate” the number of hours workers put in.

“Contractors are squeezed so they cut corners on wages, vehicle insurance,” Schell said.

His group found instances where men who planted trees were paid $3 an hour rather than the federally mandated $7 an hour. Paper companies receive copies of the workers’ pay records, but steadfastly refuse to open them because they don’t want to know what the records show, Schell said.

“They know they’re getting cheated, but they’re terrified they’ll lose their place in line,” he said of the workers.

Since contractors are paid by the acre, there is pressure to have workers thin as many acres as possible as quickly as possible. Therefore workers spend as much time in the woods daylight allows, Schell said.

In addition to paper company disregard, federal regulators are falling down on the job, said Schell.

“The requirements are very thin. Once the workers are in the country, there is almost no oversight,” Schell said.

What it all boils down to, Colby professor Doel says, is corporate greed as the foreign workers are being exploited so companies can make more money.

“These men do not have any visibility. They are way up in the woods where no one sees them until there is a disaster,” she said.

The timber companies see things differently.

Although hard work, the jobs are valued by the men from Central America. Otherwise, they wouldn’t return to the Maine woods year after year, and even encourage friends and family members to join them, said Irving’s Gadzik.

“The fact that there are repeat people – family members and people from the same village – is an endorsement,” he said.