At meetings on Capitol Hill Tuesday, House staff members began to try to sort out who is responsible for addressing concerns over mistreatment of Latino forest workers.
The most recent round of concerns were raised by California Rep. Joe Baca, D-Rialto, who has asked the House Subcommittee on Department Operations, Oversight, Dairy, Nutrition and Forestry to investigate the matter.
"I agree that we need to protect the lives and property of our constituents by maintaining healthy forests," wrote Baca in a Jan. 23 letter requesting an oversight hearing. "Nevertheless, we must require our federal agencies to ensure that this work is not done by violating the law and exploiting (foreign) H2B guest-workers."
Unlike legions of Latino laborers who work illegally in this country, H2B guest workers are here legally. An estimated 10,000 work in forestry - often in dangerous conditions - a subject explored in a November Bee series, "The Pineros: Men of the Pines."
Baca's letter came two months after another California congressman - George Miller, D-Martinez - asked the House Committee on Resources to conduct hearings. Miller's request was referred to the Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health.
But determining which government entities are responsible for the workers is tricky, one of the factors that The Bee found contributes to the neglect and mistreatment. Six federal agencies share responsibility for forest workers, but no one agency is in charge.
"This is among the issues that is on our list of priorities," said Doug Crandall, staff director of the forest subcommittee. "Right now, we are just trying to get a handle on who actually has what pieces of this puzzle."
On Tuesday, Crandall met with House Agriculture Committee staffers to try to sort things out. Both agriculture and resources share jurisdiction over the Forest Service, and Crandall said the Department of Labor and the Department of Justice may be drawn into the issue, too.
Both hearing requests focused on the fact that much of the mistreatment has taken place on government land, under contracts paid for with tax dollars awarded to labor contracting companies that employ the pineros.
Some of the workers "are not paid their full wage, denied safety equipment or are made to live in subhuman conditions because of their H2B guest worker status," Baca wrote in his letter.
Citing The Bee's series, he added:
"The articles found that Forest Service contracting officer representatives would write down ... hazardous working conditions and poor treatment of employees in their work diaries but did not act on them. By contrast, errors in tree planting and thinning were quickly attended to."
Days after the stories were published, Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth called for agency officials to rewrite labor contracts to clarify what constitutes violations of workplace law.
Last month, the Forest Service in California also teamed up with the U.S. Department of Labor and the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health to educate Forest Service employees and forest contractors about wage and safety requirements.
At the congressional level, no decision about how to proceed has been reached.
"This isn't necessarily an issue that falls under our jurisdiction," said Jon Yarian, communication director for Gil Gutknecht, the Minnesota Republican who chairs the agriculture subcommittee.
Crandall, staff director of the forest subcommittee, said he plans to schedule meetings with the Forest Service and the Department of Labor and Justice.
"We'll do that, regroup and figure out what the next steps are," Crandall said. "Sometimes we handle things better through hearings. Sometimes we handle things better through direct discussion with the agencies."Sacramento Bee
