Chain saws in hand, they trudged through the woods, slashing away at trees with no training. At night, they slept in ragged tents in bone-chilling cold. Up before dawn, they traveled to remote job sites in unsafe vans.
In the woods, U.S. Forest Service employees watching the Latino work crews took notice of the conditions, even recorded them in their agency diaries, but did not act to stop them.
Last week, the agency moved forward with plans to make field-level employees who oversee forest labor as accountable for the workers as they are for the forest work. Following through on a promise made in November, Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth altered the oversight contracts to spell out - in no uncertain terms - what constitutes a federal health and safety violation and to allow its employees to halt jobs when violations occur.
"I expect this action to improve worker health and safety across the board," Bosworth said in a written statement.
Behind the scenes, the Forest Service is taking other actions to respond to the chronic mistreatment of Latino forest workers - a problem exposed in a November series in The Bee titled "The Pineros: Men of the Pines."
The agency is creating a computer database to enable Forest Service employees to identify forest contractors who have violated federal health, safety and wage laws. Until now, such contractors often have landed job after job with the Forest Service.
Bosworth also plans to examine the safety and health of Latino crews when evaluating the performance of regional foresters who oversee big blocks of national forests around the country.
"The disappointing aspect of this is I've been emphasizing safety so much in the 4 1/2 years that I've been chief," he said in an earlier interview. "I want safety to be on everybody's minds."
Last week's changes are meant to strip away the ambiguity in the agency's service contracts, which provide oversight for the planting, thinning and other manual labor commonly performed by Latino crews on tens of thousands of acres of public lands across the nation.
"We need the kind of contracts that give our folks clear direction," Bosworth said. "If you have a contract fire crew that shows up for a fire and doesn't have the training and equipment, they can't work. We need to use that same approach" with forest workers.
Migrant advocates applauded the changes but said they should have been put into place years ago - and that more needs to be done.
"This is an improvement in practice that should help ... if it is rigorously implemented," said Michael Dale, executive director of the Northwest Workers' Justice Project in Oregon.
But Dale added: "It would also be helpful to require that housing be provided within a reasonable commuting distance from the work site to avoid the frequent auto accidents involving exhausted crews."
Over the past three years, 23 Latino forest workers are known to have died in van accidents across the country, including two Guatemalans in Washington last month who were on their way to pick brush for the floral industry on the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. No matter the employer or ownership of the land where they toil - public or private - the pineros work, and commute, at great risk.
Previous Forest Service contracts for the government thinning and clearing work were vague on safety. The new language says contractors must train employees "in the safe operation of equipment" - knowledge many workers now pick up on the job. It also says that safety gear previously overlooked on many jobs sites, such as eye and face protection, "shall be provided, used and maintained."
The contracts also will now address the primitive camps where pineros have struggled to stay warm. "Every ... shelter shall provide protection from the elements. Where heat ... is not provided, other arrangements should be made to protect workers from the cold." Other language emphasizes that vans must meet federal transportation standards.
Bosworth said the Forest Service plans to work more closely with the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration to address the conditions, too. "It's got to be difficult for them with these (workers) scattered in so many different places in the woods," he said.
Although several government agencies share legal responsibility for the pineros, on public land the Forest Service often is the only one that even knows where crews are working.
The realities in the remote woods where pineros work suggest Bosworth may face an uphill battle to reform - in part because the contracting officers and their representatives in the field are under pressure to get as much work done as possible and have been trained to tend more to trees than to migrant laborers.
Nationwide, the Forest Service faces an enormous backlog in reforestation and thinning work - much of which is carried out to protect western forests and communities from wildfire. In 2003, the agency reported that some 898,000 acres needed thinning, but work was completed on just 163,500 acres.
After The Bee stories were published, Forest Service officials in Arkansas released documents showing another forest worker there had been hurt working for a company the agency's own files portrayed as troubled.
It happened in late 2003, a year and a half after OSHA had fined Grano Reforestation, a Forest Service contractor, $12,000 for more than a dozen safety violations on a thinning job in which two pineros were injured..
In the most recent case, another worker employed by Grano broke his neck on the Ozark National Forest when "a tree limb referred to as a widow maker" struck him on the head, said Ouachita National Forest spokeswoman Cheryl Chatham. The worker was wearing a hard hat and recovered, she added. After the accident, the Forest Service itself was cited by OSHA for three serious violations.
Other OSHA violations were found on the Grano job site during the investigation of the accident, too.
Yet, in April 2004, Ouachita National Forest contracting officer Gary Baber wrote an e-mail defending the company's work to more than a dozen of his agency colleagues.
In documents released through the Freedom of Information Act months after The Bee's initial request, Baber wrote:
"Let me say to all that Grano Reforestation is one of our best contractors ... He has had excellent past performance and he was just recently awarded a new contract that could go for up to 4 years.
"This is not necessarily about Grano specifically but about our entire ... (vegetation) management program," Baber added. "I am sure that these same violations could be found on almost all our contractors."Sacramento Bee
