AFTER THE ACCIDENT

It has been two weeks since the worst traffic accident in Maine history took the lives of 14 migrant forestry workers. The bodies have been returned to home villages in Guatemala and Honduras; family and friends there have begun the long process of coping with their heartbreaking loss.

Here in Maine, the question is whether any process has begun. The circumstances of this accident opened a lot of eyes to working conditions in the commercial forest: The grueling hours and heavy paycheck deductions that left so little to send home do much to explain why Maine people will no longer do this work and give the impression that one of the state’s most important industries takes advantage of some of the world’s most unfortunate people. Will this new awareness lead to change, or will this tragedy become a fading, unpleasant memory, just one more bad thing that happened to people we didn’t know from a place far away?

The most obvious circumstance – arguably a contributing factor in the accident – is the lack of housing within a reasonable distance of the remote work sites. These men died near the end of the daily 21/2-hour drive down treacherous woods roads, in a van provided by their employer at exorbitant cost, just to get to eight hours of backbreaking labor, a wearying routine repeated day after day. Accidents had occurred before, there had been a few deaths, nothing had been done.

The forestry industry, here and nationally, says it would offer work-site housing to its migrant workers were it not for onerous federal regulations on migrant housing. The implication, even assertion, is that the feds require nothing less than apartments in the woods with full sewer and water systems.

Onerous federal regulations are a convenient and common scapegoat, but in this case they do not apply. The OSHA rules on migrant housing do not require full sewer and water systems. Privies and chemical toilets are acceptable, provided they are kept clean. Water for drinking, cooking and bathing need not come from a public supply or a well; a tank hauled into the site is fine, provided the water is safe and of adequate quantity. The requirement of 50 square feet per worker in sleeping areas might seem onerous until one does the math: That’s just a shade over seven-by-seven, barely room for a cot and a place to stand.

Many states with substantial seasonal influxes of migrant workers – Florida, California, Washington and Michigan, for example – have formed public-private partnerships to provide those workers with decent housing; state and federal grants are combined with contributions from the relevant industry. With so many forest workers now in Maine on H2B visas (seasonal, non-skilled, non-agricultural labor), the substantial influx threshold has been passed and the need for such efforts is clear.

In order to obtain these visas, the Maine Department of Labor must certify that the industry made a reasonable effort to hire U.S. citizens. Such certification has never been denied. It is time to re-examine the certification process.

The H2B visa was intended to fill short-term employment needs in such industries as hospitality and construction in parts of the country experiencing rapid growth. It was only after the forestry industry successfully lobbied Congress in 1996 to be included in the H2B program, rather than the more appropriate and marginally more protective H2A program for agriculture, that its use in the woods exploded – in Maine, from 50 that year to 600 the next to 1,200 today.

This explosion, however, is not occurring in parts of the country experiencing rapid growth – rapid decline is the norm in the timberlands of the rural South, the West and, of course, northern Maine, as people leave low-paying jobs in the woods for better jobs elsewhere. Rather than respond to this competition for workers by offering better jobs, the forestry industry has chosen to expand its search for workers to some of the most impoverished countries in the world. It probably is not coincidence that woods wages declined by more than 10 percent in just the first four years of the expanded H2B program.

The forestry industry must decide for itself how it will attract the workers it needs. For the state to certify the need for H2B visas with such minimal scrutiny is unacceptable, it skews the law of supply and demand by artificially inflating the supply of temporary workers from a limitless source of desperate human beings, thus making the prospects for permanent residents that much bleaker and accelerating the population exodus. Whenever there is an appeal to Congress to expand temporary work visas, whether for skilled high-tech or healthcare professionals or for unskilled laborers, the concerned industry always asserts that the request is not an attempt to drive down wages, but to fill jobs left vacant by an expanding economy. That is hardly the case here.

Maine can be better than this. Whether it will be better than this depends upon whether what happened two weeks ago is seen as something more than just the worst traffic accident in Maine history.