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COPYRIGHT 2005 The Institute Inc.
Introduction
Each winter, communities of workers from Mexico and Central America arrive in rural areas of the southeastern U. S. and begin the job of planting the more than 2 million acres of trees that are grown every year. In the past couple of decades these workers have helped transform the landscape of the rural south from exhausted agricultural fields and idle pasture to one dominated by forests and pine plantations. Through a U. S. Department of Labor guest worker program known as the H-2B program, workers are brought into the country on temporary work visas to work in the forests for as little as a couple of months to as long as one year. The workers travel around the southeast, moving daily and weekly between hotels and trailer parks, working mostly on privately owned land. Though largely an invisible workforce, these temporary migrants have helped to build the forest products industry into one of the largest and most important industries in rural Alabama.
This movement of guest workers between sending countries and the southeastern U. S. afforded us the opportunity to examine the dynamics of guest worker recruitment. Focusing on the state of Alabama, we examined the linkages between the recruitment of temporary workers and the organization of labor in the forest products industry. Although there are still some native workers performing forest management work, there is an increasing dependence on guest workers and other migrants to fill these positions. This study illuminates the government's role in facilitating guest worker recruitment and employment, employers' perspectives on guest workers and native workers, and the guest workers' perception of life and work in the U. S.
We begin with an overview of forestry in Alabama, which generally represents how forestry is practiced throughout the southeast. This is followed by a description of U. S. guest worker programs, both historic and contemporary. We document the shift in preference for guest workers within the forest industry in the southeast. Next, given the shift to guest workers within this industry, we examine four separate cases of forest labor contractors and their employees, illuminating the recruitment process and employers' and workers' perspectives on the role of foreign workers in the forest industry. We conclude with a policy assessment in which we argue that the program must be viewed in light of complex relationships among workers and employers that provide advantages and disadvantages for both groups, as well as the impact the program has on native workers in the receiving areas. While the industry argues that they need guest workers because of a shortage of native workers, it is likely that there is only a shortage of workers willing to take forest management positions under the current wages and sets of working conditions.
Alabama's Forests and the Forest Industry In The South
The growth in importance of the forest products industry in Alabama over the last several decades has created new opportunities for migrant and guest worker employment. Endless cotton fields have been replaced by pine and hardwood forests, processing mills have sprouted across the land and the rural south has been heralded as the "wood basket" for the world (Williams 2000). Drawn to the state by water and timber resources along with aggressive tax incentives, the pulp and paper industry has been a dominant economic actor in Alabama since the mid-1960s and is now home to fourteen pulp and paper mills (Bliss and Bailey, forthcoming). Pulpwood, the raw material of paper production, accounted for 33% of the total timber harvest in the U. S. in 1996; 77% of the pulpwood harvest was in the south (U. S. Forest Service 2001). In 2001, forest products led other manufacturing industries in the state of Alabama in terms of value added ($4.1 billion), value of shipments ($9.7 billion) and total payroll ($1.3 billion) (U. S. Census Bureau 2003).
Although existing forests were part of the initial draw of the industry, conversion of agricultural land to forestland has resulted in an increase in planted forests which produce almost all the fiber for pulp and paper production. The south contains the most intensively managed forests in the world (U. S. Forest Service 2001). Management intensity is reflected in the scale of activities, such as tree planting, thinning, and herbicide application. Management intensity also refers to the amount of timber production from planted pine plantations as compared to timber production through natural regeneration (U. S. Forest Service 2001). The area of natural pine has declined from about 72 million acres across the south in 1953 to about 34 million acres in 1999. Since 1953, planted pine has increased from about 2 million acres to more than 32 million acres in 1999 (U. S. Forest Service 2001). In 2000, Alabama had approximately 5.5 million acres in pine plantations, up by 6% since 1990 (Hartsell and Brown 2002). The U. S. Forest Service has projected that by the year 2040 that number will double to 8 million acres in pine plantations. Migrant and guest worker tree planters have played an important role in this transformation of the southern landscape, and as the number of natural pine stands decreases and planted pine increases, the demand for workers to plant these trees and manage the forests will also increase.
The increasing use of foreign labor has accompanied structural changes in the organization of employment in the U. S. since the 1980s. The decline of the "Fordist" mode of production with a shift away from unionized labor and mass production brought about more flexible forms of production and a dramatic increase in part-time and temporary workers (Johnson-Webb 2003; Sassen 2001). By 1986 one-third of the American labor force consisted of part-time workers (Sassen and Smith 1992). Part-time or temporary work attracts mostly singles, young females or minorities, and of course, immigrants. In many cases, part-time or temporary work attracts few workers from any of these categories leading to the need to import foreign migrant or guest workers.
Restructuring in the forest products industry has also led to the use of independent contractors who supply workers for secondary labor markets. At one time, a pulp and paper mill might have employed timber brokers, loggers, and tree planters, but no longer. Independent contractors are being used to supply labor for pulp and paper mills, and also for jobs in the management of timberlands (Bailey et al. 1996).
By creating a dual labor market, the industry was able to reduce the labor force, thereby reducing operating costs and maintaining or increasing profits. Blue-collar jobs that were once in the core sector, and perhaps unionized, have become periphery jobs attractive to only a subset of native workers and steadily attracting more and more foreign workers. These are mostly seasonal, low paid, and often dangerous.
Tree planting, herbicide application, and thinning are periphery jobs that at one time, even after restructuring, were performed by native male workers at relatively decent wages. In discussions with land managers and even forest labor contractors, we found that all of them at one time performed the work themselves. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, forest management labor was provided by cooperatives of native workers (Hartzell 1987). According to many contractors, undocumented workers were recruited by industrial landowners in the late 1980s to break the hold of the cooperatives on costs for management jobs. Many informants told us that forest management workers today are earning less than they did doing the same work in 1980. Many of these former forest workers now own the companies that bring in guest workers to do the jobs they once held. In the words of one contractor, "it was a natural progression." The contractor said that in his case, he finished college, got married and decided it was time for him to not travel as much so he started his own company.
Most of Alabama's pulp and paper mills and the trees that fuel them are located in an area known as the Black Belt. Little has changed since 1936, when Arthur Raper, in PREFACE TO PEASANTRY, described the region as a land of "the richest soil and the poorest people" (Raper 1936: 3). Alabama's Black Belt region, consisting of 16 counties, is the poorest in the state and thus one of the poorest regions in the nation, with unemployment rates more than twice the national average (Washington County 14.3%) and poverty levels as high as three times the national average (Wilcox County 39.9%) (U. S. Census Bureau 2003).
Nevertheless, forest labor contractors have consistently requested and been granted hundreds of H-2B visas for importing workers into these areas. The story is not restricted to Alabama, as poverty stricken rural areas throughout the south including Georgia, Mississippi and Arkansas have experienced tremendous increases in the use of guest workers in recent years (McDaniel and Casanova 2003). The poverty evident in many parts of the Deep South is a remnant of the patterns of social interaction and organization created by plantation cotton agriculture. Cheap labor was equally important to plantation owners in the past as it is to timberland owners today, and many of the characteristics of the region's political economy can be found in the paternalism, fatalism and factionalism that structured work relation in the South in previous eras (Hyland and Timberlake 1993; Duncan 1996). These developments have led to questions regarding the role of forest industries in economic development in the region. These trends also raise questions regarding the role of the government in maintaining underdevelopment in poverty-stricken areas of the South through maintenance of guest worker programs that can potentially drive wages and working conditions down for native workers.
In the state of Alabama, research has shown that after decades of active recruitment of forest products industries and increased forest productivity, rural development has failed to occur and in fact "timber dependency" has helped maintain racially based social inequities and segmented labor markets (Bailey et al. 1996), inadequately funded public schools (Joshi et al. 2000), and inequitable land concentrations that can be traced back to slave-based agriculture in the pre-Civil War era (Bliss et al. 1998). The shift to guest workers to fill jobs previously performed by local workers represents a continued marginalization of local labor, and evidence that the linchpin of local economic activity is effectively divorced from the lives of people in rural Alabama. Capital investments in pulp and paper mills are in excess of $1 billion per mill in the poorest regions of the U. S. (Bailey et al. 1996). However, capital investments have not translated into increased employment. Employers prefer local, native workers for the relatively few core jobs within mills that provide competitive salaries and excellent benefits, while preferring guest workers for the more numerous secondary and peripheral...
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