SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER Montgomery, Alabama June 9, 2005
New Center lawsuits seek reform of forestry industry
With a goal of reforming the abusive employment practices of the nation's forestry industry, the Center's Immigrant Justice Project (IJP) has filed three class action lawsuits. The actions, filed in federal courts in Atlanta, New Orleans and El Dorado, Arkansas, were brought on behalf of migrant agricultural workers who were admitted to the United States to work under the temporary foreign worker visa program. Brought from Mexico and Guatemala, the workers plant pine trees in the southeastern states, the nation's largest timber-producing region. The plaintiffs are indigent workers who left their homes and families, often risking their life savings on the venture. They perform arduous jobs that the timber contractors certify that American workers are unwilling to do. Workers routinely work 60 or more hours each week, but earn substantially less than the minimum wage of $5.15 per hour. They are not paid overtime and often have to pay for their own work tools, visas and travel expenses, in violation of the law. "Because of language barriers and their vulnerable status under immigration laws, these workers may be the most exploited in the nation," said IJP director Mary Bauer. "This industry is in rampant noncompliance with the law," she said. "I have never seen an industry where such wanton violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act are the norm." Forestry is a big business nationally and is one of the largest industries in the South. The South now accounts for about 80 percent of all trees planted in the country. The case filed Monday in Atlanta is Escolastico de Leon-Granados, et al. v. Eller and Sons Trees, Inc., et al. The two cases filed in April are Hugo Martin Recinos-Recinos, et al. v. Express Forestry Inc., et al., filed in Louisiana, and Federico Salinas-Rodriguez v. Alpha Services LLC., filed in Arkansas but moved to the federal court in Jackson, Mississippi, this week. Eller and Sons, based in LaGrange, Georgia, is the largest forestry contractor in America. Express Forestry is an Arkansas-based forestry company doing business across the southeast. Alpha Services is an Idaho-based forestry corporation. "It is an injustice what they do to us," said Federico Salinas-Rodriquez, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit filed in Arkansas, through an interpreter. "We are doing this thinking of other people — of our children and our brothers so that they may have better luck with this work."
Facts about the forestry industry and forestry workers
About the forestry industry The South is the largest timber producing region in the country, accounting for nearly 62% of all US timber harvest. The South accounted for 79% of all trees planted in the US for fiscal year 1998.
In 2002, the top tree planting states, with more than 100,000 acres planted were as follows (emphasis on states served by the Center's Immigrant Justice Project):
— Unpublished data. USDA Forest Service, State & Private Forestry, Cooperative Forestry Washington Office. According to the American Forest & Paper Association, in 1999, the forest community planted approximately 1.7 billion trees on US land. Exports of US pulp and paper products in 2000 totaled nearly $12 billion.
In 2004, the US Department of Labor certified 168,471 H-2B workers, 22,083 of which were forestry workers ("Tree Planter" or "Forest Worker"). This does not reflect the number of visas actually issued by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (now Department of Homeland Security), which, according to regulations, should not issue more than 66,000 visas. According to the federal regulations of the H-2B program, the prevailing wage (the minimum wage set by the Department of Labor so as to not adversely affect the employment of US workers) for tree planters in the following states should be:
— US Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration Although the H2B contract specifies an hourly wage, tree planters are more often paid by bag of 1,000 pines that they plant, ranging anywhere from $15-$30 per bag. By law, the employer is obligated to make up the difference between the bag rate and the prevailing wage rate. An experienced hand-planting crew can average 1,500 well-planted seedlings planted per person per day. On rough sites, a worker might average 600 trees per day and in open fields, up to 2,000. At the average bag rate, a worker who plants 1500 trees a day could make between $22.50 and $45 a day, which is far less than the legally required wage. Most workers report working between 8 and 12 hours a day. They also rarely, if ever, earn overtime pay, despite the fact that they often work 6 full days a week and average well over 40 hours. They are routinely required to purchase their own work-related tools and incur other expenses and deductions for quality which unlawfully cut into their pay. Tree planters are entitled to overtime under the Federal Labor Standards Act. Pursuant to this law, overtime should be paid based on the higher of the prevailing wage where the work is performed, or the wage rate earned by the piece.
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