When we talk about forestry jobs in Oregon, you might automatically think of logging. But there are countless other roles in the industry, including planting trees after a forested area has been clear cut to thinning the understory for wildfire management. As recently reported by Jefferson Public Radio, that workforce has evolved from worker cooperatives of the 1970s to largely immigrant contractors, known as “pineros,” which we see today.
JPR reporter Justin Higginbottom joins us to talk more about his deep dive into this side of the forestry industry and how it’s changed over the last 50 years.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. When you think about forestry jobs in Oregon, your mind might immediately go to logging. But there are many other roles in the industry, including planting trees after a forested area has been clear cut or thinning the understory for wildfire management. As recently reported by Justin Higginbottom at Jefferson Public Radio, the forestry workforce has evolved from worker cooperatives in the 1970s to contractors who hire immigrants known as “pineros” today. Hickinbottom joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Justin Higginbottom: Thanks for having me, Dave.
Miller: What first got you interested in forestry work today, the historical change of it?
Higginbottom: I first got into this story because there was a lawsuit in our county, in Jackson County, of a pinero, a guest worker working in forestry. He’s suing a few contractors, those who hire this type of labor, after he was injured on the job. The complaint was pretty extensive, dozens of pages, which might be expected, because the lawsuit is for, if I remember, over $40 million. But that lawsuit alleged that he didn’t receive proper training or proper medical care, that it was a really unfortunate situation. The complaint actually went into what his type of work entails, and this labor group, known as pineros, are guest workers, H2B visa workers who work in forestry, from Latin America.
That first got me interested in this topic because that’s, like you mentioned in your intro, not who I was expecting doing this work, all the forestry work that’s non-timber related really. Researching that more, I got into the history of what this looked like prior to most of this work being done by H2B workers.
Miller: Before we get into that history, can you just give us a sense for how big this sector is in southern Oregon in particular?
Higginbottom: Southern Oregon’s really a leader in at least the contractors that employ guest workers. It looks like a good chunk of this forestry work is being done, at this point, by H2B visa holders, guest workers. In 2024, nationwide, 13,000 H2B visas were certified, basically approved, by the federal government for this type of work. This labor intensive forestry work involves wildfire mitigation or reforestation or tree planting. And out of that, Jackson County alone accounted for about 3,000 of those requests for visas. I think the next highest county was somewhere in Mississippi where there were 200 visas requested. So Jackson County and the Rogue Valley has really become a center for these workers and the number of contractors who hire these workers to do this sort of work.
Miller: It’s a truly surprising percentage, I mean, close to 25% of all of these visas nationwide in one ‒ and it’s not like Jackson County is a tiny county ‒ but it’s just one county in this country. It’s a real surprise. Let’s go into a little bit of the history, which in some ways can help explain that a little bit. But going back 50 years, who were the Hoedads?
Higginbottom: Fifty years ago and in the early 70s, the Hoedads were a large worker cooperative that were tree planters. They got started because laws were starting to be passed that required reforestation on land that was clear cut by loggers. Notably, there was the 1972 Oregon Forest Protection Act. And the federal government was giving these contracts to crews to go into the forest and do tree planting, which still really can’t be mechanized. It’s very labor intensive. You have to trek into the backcountry and it just takes hard labor.
I spoke to one of [the Hoedads cooperative] co-founders, Jerry Rust, who’s from Oregon. He started the group with a few others, but they were really operating in the counterculture spirit of the time. They were kind of back-to-landers. They were hippies, a lot of them. They were activists. They were anti-war environmentalists, some of the early environmentalists in the nation.
But they got this idea that this is a great use of [their] time. We’ll start this business to get these contracts and do some good and plant some trees. And because they were early 70s hippies, they made it a worker cooperative, which makes sense. So it was a very democratic model. They voted on things like payment on projects and things like how compensation was awarded to the crew members.
Miller: What did you hear from former members about the culture of the different crews?
Higginbottom: Yeah that was really interesting to me and it sounded like quite a fun and interesting time in Oregon’s history. I spoke to a former president, Greg Nagle, who himself is just a fascinating, fascinating guy. He said they had hundreds of workers and really dozens of crews. And each crew would occasionally have their own customs or ideology.
Greg Nagle, his crew were named Red Star, which hints at where they were leaning politically. They were social democrats though he said there was a Marxist crew. There was actually an all-lesbian crew based out of Eugene called Full Moon Rising. Then there were more sort of, party/druggy crews, as he described it. But these crews were different and they operated somewhat independently, where they would vote, within the crew themselves, on how they would receive compensation from these federal contracts. So they kept the democratic model alive in these crews.
Miller: There were hundreds of workers on these crews. Were the Hoedads able to amass political power?
Higginbottom: Yeah, they were. They were some of the early proponents of regulations against pesticide and herbicide use in Oregon. And they really helped support some of those early regulations. They also got Jerry Rust, the co-founder I mentioned, elected in Lane County as a board, as a supervisor there in 1980. So they did have some political weight, almost like a union. So they formed somewhat political groups, a political block that they were able to organize.
Miller: What eventually brought about the end of the Hoedads?
Higginbottom: The Hoedads lasted really until the mid 90’s, and the end was really a factor for a few things. First, they were competing more with contractors, which were traditionally structured businesses that would hire employees and pay a wage. And those contractors, at the time, were largely using undocumented workers which were prevalent in this area because this is an agricultural center, especially Rogue Valley. There were a lot of migrant workers that would move through the region and pick pears and then move south to pick other crops later in the season. And those workers began getting into tree planting and forestry work.
The contractors could pay them less so, in theory, they could outbid the Hoedads for federal contracts. The businesses, these contractors, also lobbied against the Hoedad models. So at the time, worker cooperatives in Oregon didn’t have to pay workers' compensation which really lowered the cost of running a collective like this. And even the former Hoedad members that I spoke to, said the contractors had a point. We were running at lower costs because we didn’t have to pay this worker compensation. So the contractors lobbied to get that changed, so the cost increased for this worker cooperative model.
And then the other factors, these young idealistic types started to drift away. They started to go back to school. They started families. There’s a book called “Pineros” by a professor at the University of Washington. She describes this, that these idealistic types became a bit more realistic as they got older and they just started drifting away. So that critical mass of energy that you found in the early 70s started to dissipate and that contributed to their end.
Miller: How did the system go from largely undocumented workers to largely guest workers with these H2B visas?
Higginbottom: It has a lot to do with Reagan, actually. In 1986, Reagan passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which legalized a lot of those in the country ‒ a lot of the migrant workers ‒ illegally. So they became citizens and they had all this forestry experience. They actually started, which I can talk about later, they opened their own contracting businesses to hire their own workers. But it was really after that legislation and the introduction of the guest worker program that didn’t always exist, that these contractors began relying more on guest workers.
From talking to some of these pineros, they’re really hired in these informal ways. They’ll know family members or friends or there’ll be a labor broker in their hometown in Mexico that they’ll get into contact with. And so that really pushed this evolution for the industry to really rely on these H2B workers.
Miller: Going back to that worker model, the Hoedads, does anything like that exist today or was it just a product of its time?
Higginbottom: It was really a product of its time. There’s not anything I can find that super closely models that. The closest I could find was these nonprofit groups, and one prominent one in Ashland ‒ in Jackson County ‒ called Lomakatsi. They’re a nonprofit. They do reforestation work, they partner with federal agencies and tribes and contractors themselves. But they’re operating, as the owner there said, “In the spirit of the Hoedads.”
They have a Hoedad board member. What that means is that they try to pay their workers equitably. They pay benefits, they pay for and provide safety training. They pay drive time. A complaint I hear from current pineros workers is that you’re not necessarily paid for the time it takes to get to these remote locations. So your actual wage is much lower than what they might say it is. But they’re a group that’s, at least, operating in the same philosophy as the Hoedads, currently.
Miller: Just briefly, what does demand for this kind of work look like in the coming years?
Higginbottom: It’s huge. The National Forest Service, and we’ll sort of see how this changes with the new administration, but they need to treat tens of millions of acres for wildfire mitigation. And then in the coming decades, there’s a huge demand for this work and it’s evolved. So the Hoedads started in tree planning, and that work’s really shifted towards more fuels reduction and things like that, with the threat of wildfire. So there’s huge demand now and there’s going to be huge demand in the decades to come.
Miller: Justin, thanks very much.
Higginbottom: Thank you.
Miller: Justin Higginbottom is a reporter for Jefferson Public Radio covering health and public safety.
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