News
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Street Roots • Feb. 5-11,2016
Timber’s fallen
State hearings reveal the plight o f immigrant forestry workers who live in fear o f retaliation i f they speak out
BY EMILY GREEN
This is part 1 of a
three-part series
on the working
conditions and
treatment of
immigrant forestry
workers.
STAFF W R ITER
A ny Oregonian who watches network
/ % television is probably familiar with
JL A periodic campaigns of state-
sponsored ads boasting “strong laws” in
Oregon that require replanting after logging
and other healthy-forest management
practices. These ads are paid for by taxes
collected from the timber industry and
broadcast on its behalf.
What you won’t see in those ads is the
invisible labor force that keeps the timber
industry, Ü.S. Forest Service and Bureau of
Land Management compliant with those
“strong laws.”
For the past three decades, Oregon’s
timber and forestry sectors have been
hoisted up on the backs of thousands of
immigrant and guest workers from Latin
America. But language barriers and the
isolated nature of their work has kept them
out of public-view, given them little
recourse for workplace violations and made
them susceptible to widespread
exploitation.
That was the sobering message delivered
by immigrant workers and their advocates
before the governor’s Environmental
Justice Task Force in September. The
testimony has drawn the attention of
Oregon’s top industry regulators, Bureau of
Labor and Industry Commissioner Brad
Avakian and Oregon Occupational Safety
and Health Division Administrator Michael
Wood, both of whom will join the task
force’s continued discussion around issues
facing immigrant forestry and farm workers
on Friday.
For first-generation American Joel Iboa,
forestry and sawmill work has been his
family’s legacy. He grew up with relatives
who were missing body parts and suffering
the health effects of working in Oregon’s
forests, sawmills and fields. He listened as
his aunts and uncles told what he described
as horror stories about accidents out in the
forest and gross mistreatment of workers,
sometimes they laughed while he sat
quietly in disbelief.
Iboa’s family immigrated to Oregon from
rural areas of Zacatecas, a state in North
Central Mexico known for silver mining and
agriculture. The economy in Zacatecas is
seasonally driven and weather dependent;
no rain means no money.
His father, Joel Iboa Montes, came to
Medford in the mid 1980s just after turning
18. The middle child of nine siblings, he
had followed his older brothers north with
dreams of going to college.
He arrived on a Saturday night in the
middle of winter. The following Monday, his
brothers woke him before sunrise. They
would be “pulling trees” that day. It was
cold. Montes was used to the temperate
80-degree winters of Central Mexico.
“I get there,” he remembered, “I see this
huge, long field - rows that were four feet
across, and I couldn’t see the end of it, at
least a mile in length. I see 50 people:
women, men and even children, and they all
speak Spanish. And I’m like, ‘OK, this is
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