Woods workers’ commute long, dangerous

The 14 Central American men killed last week when their van plunged off a logging road bridge in the Allagash Wilderness Waterway routinely spent nearly as much time each day getting to and from work as they did actually laboring in the forest thinning small trees.

But they may not have had to live that far away from their work site. Recreational camps outside the entrance to the Allagash usually are available for rent if the foreign workers want to live closer to the site.

The men, from Honduras and Guatemala, lived in Caribou and commuted nearly three hours over mostly dirt roads to get to work. They were not paid for their travel time. In fact, they had to pay $84 a week each to ride in the van rented by Evergreen Forestry Services, which hired the workers but owns no land or camps.

Where the men lived may have been a matter of choice, a decision based either on the fact that they knew people in Caribou, including women they dated or married, or they didn’t know they had any other choice.

Under a federal work-visa program for the forestry industry, an employer is not required to provide housing to its foreign workers. If the men worked in agriculture, however, the employers would have been required to provide a place for the men to stay close to where they were working.

Vaughn LeBlanc of the Maine Department of Labor explained that agriculture and tree planting are similar functions, but regulations treat them differently.

“There’s no difference between planting a rose bush and planting a tree,” he said.

A lengthy commute for foreign workers employed in forestry is not uncommon – and too often is deadly. Dozens of workers have died in traffic accidents across the country, including two others in Maine.

“The commute to work for migrant workers is too often a deadly commute,” said Eric Nelson, an attorney with Pine Tree Legal Assistance in Bangor. His group represents farmworkers, but cannot help foreign woods workers because of their different visa statuses.

“If you can travel 60 to 70 miles per hour in the woods of Maine carrying 15 workers, [the industry] is not regulated enough,” Nelson said.

He and others wonder why the foreign workers cannot be housed in logging camps much closer to where the work is.

The men killed last week apparently had been living in Caribou “for years,” said Juan Perez-Febles, a migrant advocate with the state Labor Department’s division of Migrant Services. One or more of the men had established relationships with community members and wanted to live closer to them. The others stayed with him, Perez-Febles said.

“Maybe it was their choice to live there,” he said.

According to camp owners outside the Allagash, every year there are plenty of cabins available for foreign workers to rent. The cost of electricity and heat is incorporated into the rent, and some of the camps also offer clean blankets and bedding. Rents would vary depending on how many people were staying at the camps and for how long.

“Usually you could work [the rent] out so it’s reasonable,” said one camp owner, who did not want to say how much the rent could be.

Even living outside the gates of the Allagash would require a commute of up to one hour or more each way to a job site. And living inside the Allagash, on private forestry property is out of the question.

Greg Schell, an attorney with the Migrant Farmworkers Justice Project in Florida, said the timber companies do not want workers housed in camps on their land because they don’t want to accept the liability.

However, Chuck Gadzik, the forester who oversees J.D. Irving Ltd.’s 1.5 million acres of land in Maine, said if a contractor came to his company and wanted to set up a camp in the woods, Irving would be supportive of that. No one has asked.

Traveling great distances to work in the woods is a problem he faces with his own staff, Gadzik said. He rents an apartment in Presque Isle, and the man who oversees the work done by foreign crews on Irving’s Aroostook County lands commutes daily from Edmundston, New Brunswick.

“It is not appealing for people to spend long hours in the woods and then to spend evenings in seclusion in a camp. Everything that happens in the woods involves that level of travel.

“Ashland is not downtown Portland, but it has more to offer than a camp,” he added.

David Hernandez-Caballero, a counselor with the Embassy of Honduras in Washington, D.C., said this week he hopes the federal government will review its policies on forestry industry visas so that employer-provided housing is required. They need “a better place to rest so they can do a better job.”

He said there is a Spanish saying, “Dan y dan,” which means, “They give and they give.”

“If you provide something good for your worker, you will get something good for it,” Hernandez-Caballero said.