Guest Column
- By Carrie Kilman | Staff Writer, Tolerance.org
- June 27, 2005
A lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center's Immigrant Justice Project seeks to change how the forestry industry treats migrant laborers like Escolastico De Leon Granados.
In his native Guatemala, Escolastico De Leon Granados worked odd jobs: as a day laborer at a coffee plant, as a handyman around town.
"There is no other way to earn money there," he says. He owns land but struggled to earn enough money to feed his family.
In 1997, Escolastico gave more than $1,000 and the deed to his land to a recruiter for Eller and Sons, a Georgia-based forestry contractor, in exchange for a temporary work visa and a plane ticket to the United States.
Each year since, he leaves his wife and four children and travels to the United States for eight-month stints to plant pine and oak trees in Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee. He comes, he says, "to earn money so our family can live better."
But it hasn't quite worked out that way.
Bordering on slavery
Earlier this month, Escolastico became the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit, filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center's Immigrant Justice Project, against Eller and Sons, the largest forestry contractor in the nation. It's the third such lawsuit filed by the Immigrant Justice Project this year.
Escolastico is one of an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 migrant tree planters working in the southeastern United States — more workers than any other crop in the region.
Coming from places like Guatemala, Mexico and Honduras, the workers — typically poor and male — are lured here by the promise of wages better than what they could earn in their home countries.
And they come here legally, on H-2B visas allowing U.S. companies to import temporary labor when they can't find workers in the United States.
Migrant forestry workers typically work up to 12 hours a day, six or seven days a week. They earn about $25 for every 1,000 trees planted and usually plant between 1,500 and 3,000 trees a day.
It is arduous labor, requiring workers to dig a hole, plant a seedling, pack down the dirt, and move eight feet to the next planting site an average of once every 10 seconds.
The law guarantees H-2B tree-planters overtime pay, reimbursement for travel expenses and visa fees, and an hourly "prevailing wage," usually $8 to $10 an hour, depending on the state.
Yet H-2B forestry workers usually earn between $200 and $300 a week, roughly equivalent to $3 to $5 an hour for a 60-hour work week.
This is because forestry contractors almost never comply with the law, say immigration advocates. And, because the contractors control the visas and often require deeds in exchange for jobs, workers almost never complain.
"People don't have freedom of movement because of the huge power the employer has over them," says Greg Schell, a lawyer with the Florida Migrant Farmworker Justice Project who's worked with migrant laborers for more than 20 years.
"Forestry workers are probably the single most neglected group of migrant workers in the country."
It's a system, Schell says, that "borders on slavery."
Fighting for our families
Escolastico wears a faded plaid shirt and a "Korean Veteran" baseball cap over curly dark-brown hair. He is 34 years old, the father of two boys and two girls, ages 4 to 11. He speaks almost no English, although he says he hopes someday to learn.
Like other forestry workers, Escolastico receives an H-2B visa to plant trees from November to July. Then he returns home for four months, before returning to Georgia to repeat the cycle.
Through an interpreter, he says he came to the United States "to watch out for my family. ... They told me the work would be hard. My people work in the fields and it's always hard — we expect it and can handle it. But it was much worse than we thought it would be."
During the planting season, Escolastico's crew of 15 to 25 men travels from site to site across the Southeast, living in motels with four to six men to a room.
"We leave the motel at 5 or 6 (a.m.)," he says. "We go to the cooler to pick up the saplings to plant that day. Sometimes we would have to drive two or three hours to get to the field. Then we plant all day, as long as it's light outside."
Eller and Sons provides the tools, but deducts the cost from workers' paychecks. Workers are required to return the tools at the end of the planting season and buy them back when they return each November.
Escolastico plants more than 1,000 trees a day and makes roughly $240 a week. At the end of each growing season, he's able to send about $500 home.
When he's in the U.S., Escolastico calls home once a week.
"It's hard for the kids, because their fathers aren't at home with them," he says. "The majority of men in my town are here, working to make things better for their families, fighting for the lives of our children."
No free passes
The lawsuit against Eller and Sons claims the company has systematically denied its workers millions of dollars in wages, overtime pay and reimbursed travel expenses. The company has until July 5 to respond.
Mary Bauer, director of the SPLC's Immigrant Justice Project, said the forestry industry was targeted "because it's so universally bad. There are a lot of industries where immigrant workers get treated badly, but forestry really stands out because violations of the law are really the norm."
Part of the problem, Bauer says, is the competitive bidding process forcing forestry contractors to cut costs in order to win contracts with large timber companies like International Paper and Weyerhaeuser.
Adds Schell: "You cannot pay your workers properly and stay in business. It's impossible. If all the timber contractors got together and said, 'No we're going to insist on a price that will allow us to follow the law and pay our workers,' then things would change."
That's exactly what Bauer hopes will happen. In addition to the suit against Eller and Sons, the Immigrant Justice Project recently filed two others, against Arkansas-based Express Forestry and Idaho-based Alpha Services.
"We want to use these lawsuits to reform the forestry industry, to pressure companies to change," she says. "We're saying that you don't get a free pass because you choose to hire immigrants. You don't get to exploit people and treat them this way."
Knowing their rights
Escolastico decided to participate in the lawsuit, he says, "so that others will see our struggle."
Yet he knows his participation comes with a risk.
"I don't think they will give us a visa again," he says. "But I already decided that if that happens, I will go (back to Guatemala) and work there and do good things for my country."
Through the lawsuit, Escolastico says he hopes tree planters will win back the money they deserve. But more than that, he says he hopes it will teach other migrant workers that they can organize for equal rights.
"I want to win something of what we're fighting for," he says. "If we don't, some of our co-workers will say, 'That didn't really do anything for us.' But if we win, the community will want to fight for our rights."
Escolastico learned about the lawsuit when outreach workers from the Immigrant Justice Project visited the motel where he and his crew were staying.
"I learned I had a right to be paid fairly," he says. "I didn't know I had the right to receive money for travel expenses. I didn't know I was supposed to be getting paid per hour. I felt a support from them (the outreach workers) that was reassuring — I felt more motivated to do something about the injustice."
Tolerance.org article at: http://www.tolerance.org/news/article_tol.jsp?id=1242
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