Migrant brush pickers face risks, few protections in WA woods
A 2022 work van crash and subsequent $1.8M in court-ordered back wages and damages cast a spotlight on the decorative forest products industry.
December 12, 2024
Atorrent of rain poured onto Francisco Gomez-Carlos as he trudged through knee-deep underbrush near Forks on the Olympic Peninsula. He scanned the lush tangles for salal, a wild shrub foraged for commercial use in floral arrangements, along a gravel path thronged by miles and miles of cascading forest. The land, he said, was managed by the government — allowing him more freedom to roam.
Although Olympic National Park hosted approximately 2.9 million visitors last year, this part of the forest shied from human touch, seemingly still waiting for its first encounter. Gomez-Carlos, shouldering numerous years of experience in brush harvesting, was used to the solitude, navigating through the dense timber without any help.
The forest held still with every step — save for the hiss and patter of the downpour.
Early autumn signaled the start of the salal season, so Gomez-Carlos explained he did not have to trek deeper to scout for product. He bobbed through a verdant blur of salal bushes, picking enough of their shiny leaves to form a bunch in just minutes. The back of his rain jacket was glazed with rainwater as he bent over to pick his next.
The three types of salal bunches each serve a different purpose. The first, and most valued, are the “long” bunches — selling then at $1.70 a piece. Next are the “special” 25-stem bunches, valued at $1.15, then the “tips” at $0.90 per bunch.
In total, Gomez-Carlos’ labor from his nearly hour-long hunt would have earned him just below $4.
He could be eyeing retirement at his age, but with his son’s health condition, Gomez-Carlos said he has no choice but to keep going. His son — also a brush picker — has had to cut back his work in the woods as he makes multiple trips a week to Port Angeles for kidney dialysis.
Both father and son forage alongside a largely invisible multitude of migrant workers recruited into the brush-harvesting industry — picking ferns, grasses, evergreen boughs and other foliage from deep in the Western Washington woods to accent flower bouquets and grace holiday wreaths. The salal plant, native to the Pacific Northwest, is highly sought for its glossy, oval-shaped leaves that lend an extra dimension to floral arrangements.
This story is part of Cascade PBS’s WA Workplace Watch, an investigative project covering worker safety and labor in Washington state.
Most salal and other brush pickers work as independent contractors. They typically purchase commercial-use permits to harvest on public land from “shopkeepers” who act as local distributors to larger commercial suppliers and retailers. Some shopkeepers can provide access to abundant private acreage or, alternatively, revoke permits.
Workers and advocates told Cascade PBS this structure leaves pickers vulnerable to unique risks or demands from shopkeepers. They have little protection from retaliation, wage theft or other abuse. A federal judge earlier this year ordered a Washington-based company to pay $1.8 million in back wages and damages over violations discovered in the wake of a work-related vehicle crash in Cowlitz County.
Brush harvesting itself can also prove dangerous as workers described solo treks deep into rough woods, harsh weather, lost co-workers, cougar run-ins and even fatal encounters with hunters. More experienced salal pickers can collect up to 300 pounds of the plant in a day, said Lesley Hoare, a migrant workers’ rights advocate and a former research coordinator at the University of Washington, but they “don’t have health care … you don’t have most protections.”
“The way it’s structured out here is that they’re independent contractors,” she said, “so that responsibility for the person in charge doesn’t actually have employer responsibility to go out and look.”
Work in the woods
Jose Hernandez Romero, now working as a trucker in his home country of El Salvador, said looking into harsh sunlight on the open road sometimes triggers fierce headaches. He traces the pain back to his time working as a brush harvester for Continental Floral Greens in the woods of Washington.
A recent estimate for how much money the forest greenery industry has brought into the state can be hard to pin down, but a 2006 piece from The Seattle Times reported that figure could hover around $236 million. A number of forest product suppliers operate out of the Pacific Northwest, and Continental Floral Greens is among the largest.
The company acts as both a grower and wholesaler of floral greenery, boasting a wide portfolio of plants that adorn holiday wreaths, garlands, centerpieces and floral bouquets. The company has operations in Washington, California, Oregon and Florida, though all four of its production facilities remain in the Northwest, in close proximity to Olympic National Forest and Tillamook State Forest in Oregon.
The company has operations for harvesting greens on its property, shipping greens to its production facility, manufacturing decorative products with those greens and shipping products to retailers in other states.
Continental Floral Greens often buys products, like salal, from independent contractors, but can also hire crews to harvest material grown on its own properties. U.S. Department of Labor investigators found that in 2022 the company had secured authorization to recruit and employ more than 500 migrant workers on H-2B visas for upcoming seasons.
Early in the morning of Nov. 2, 2022, Hernandez Romero climbed into a 15-passenger van for the trip to a Continental Floral Greens worksite where he and a crew of other Salvadorans would spend the day cutting decorative evergreen boughs. As the van traveled along the Spirit Lake Highway in Cowlitz County, it swerved off course and collided with a tree. Hernandez Romero and three others suffered significant injuries.
“The doctors told me that I had a problem with a blood vessel in my head, because at the time of the accident with the van, they had a spare tire on the outside,” he recently told Cascade PBS through an interpreter. “The spare tire struck me in the head.”
Washington State Patrol investigators reported that the driver initially claimed a deer had run in front of the van, but evidence at the scene suggested the driver had fallen asleep at the wheel. The van, provided by Continental Floral Greens for transport to the worksite, sustained major damage.
When contacted for this story, Continental Floral Greens declined to comment on its work safety protocols or this incident.
Hernandez Romero said he remained in the care of a Longview hospital for six months. In conversations with Cascade PBS, Hernandez Romero and another worker, Rutilio Gamez Torres, both indicated they received no support from the company during this time.
The State Patrol cited the driver for alleged negligent driving. The Department of Labor also concluded the driver did not have the proper medical certification for operating a work vehicle.
But the DOL investigation would ultimately uncover a number of other issues.
Independent contractors
Matt Geyman works with the state Attorney General’s Office as an assistant attorney general in its consumer protection division. But years ago he served as a lawyer for Columbia Legal Services, representing migrant workers in Washington’s forestry industry through pro bono work.
At the time, another work van crash — this one deadly — sparked state scrutiny of the hiring structures and oversight of the forest products industry.
Five workers died in the 2004 crash in Lewis County and others were hospitalized. Geyman said he joined the case as the state’s Department of Labor & Industries began investigating key employers in the brush-harvesting industry — including Continental Floral Greens, Cascade Floral Products, Pacific Coast Evergreens and others.
In a court filing, L&I argued that forestry workers should qualify as “agricultural employees” under the state’s Farm Labor Contractor Act, triggering additional protections and obligations to provide benefits. At the heart of the L&I case, Geyman explained, was who would shoulder the responsibility of protecting brush pickers.
“L&I was doing audits of the brush sheds to try to gather the facts to decide whether they were not paying into industrial insurance or the workers’ comp system,” Geyman said. “The industry was saying, ‘No, these are not [our] workers, these are independent contractors, and we don’t have any obligations to pay. … We don’t have any obligations to them.’”
L&I also found that forestry work vans are sometimes modified to carry more salal, which can result in missing seatbelts, insufficient seating and improper transportation of machetes or other harvesting tools.
The Washington State Farm Bureau, representing wholesalers at the time, argued that shed owners regularly buy from different pickers and cannot be as responsible for them as they would be for direct employees. The Court later ruled that brush pickers did not qualify for additional employee protections.
“That’s how they’ve kept it,” Hoare said, “that it’s not an employer relationship, and I think that’s how it’s lasted the way it is.”
L&I spokesperson Matt Ross told Cascade PBS in an email that someone hired as a contractor to pick brush “would be covered by safety rules like any other worker.”
But under state law, independent contractors do not have guarantees of minimum wage, overtime, paid sick leave or meal and rest breaks — and neither are they required to be covered by the hiring entity’s workers’ compensation insurance, he added. Under the permit system, salal pickers are simply selling a product they technically own.
Find tools and resources in Cascade PBS’s Check Your Work guide to search workplace safety records and complaints for businesses in your community.
Hoare said her past research has also shown that the piece-rate system leaves brush harvesters at an economic disadvantage.
“Because the work is difficult and the pay low, brush pickers occupy the bottom rung of the economic ladder. Like other transnational Indigenous groups, they often live well below the federally recognized poverty level,” she wrote in a 2007 report.
On top of that, language barriers can make it difficult for workers to understand what rights or protections they have. Geyman recalled that most of the salal harvesters he met hailed from the Todos Santos region in Guatemala — whose residents predominantly speak Mam, a Mayan language whose speakers number just over half a million. In Washington, however, that number dwindles to a working community of 1,200, according to a report in Mexican Law Review authored by Geyman and other attorneys.
“Because many Indigenous-language speakers have not obtained the fluency necessary to communicate effectively about complex issues in Spanish, and because professional Indigenous-language interpreter services are not readily available, many Indigenous people find themselves unable to express or resolve problems in critical areas such as workplace rights, housing, and health care,” the report stated.
Building worker support
Despite its weathered exterior, a recently vacated optometrist’s office in downtown Forks has taken on new life as a meeting space for the local community group Comite de Derechos Humanos de Forks (the Human Rights Committee of Forks).
Inside, Hoare paced under the fluorescent lights taking in the new space’s potential, her mousy hair tied back in a bun and thick glasses framing her face. Multiple bienvenidos were passed around as Hoare bantered with the workers and their families, transitioning warmly between English and Spanish.
The children swarmed toward the front, ready to entertain one another during the meeting. Back in the common area, Hoare stacked a table with takeout boxes of street tacos from a local vendor for the workers who had just gotten off their shifts.
Hoare moved out to Forks after completing her studies at UW. She splits her time between her job at the local college and the community group, having arranged that night’s meeting with the local migrant workers.
Eventually 10 workers from Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador gathered in a circle to discuss their experiences in brush harvesting, with Hoare interpreting.
The workers mostly expressed their safety concerns and grievances with the permit program, which they believe has aided in their exploitation.
Olympic National Forest is split among private, tribal, state and federal ownership. The workers are free to harvest on government land, but pickers say they sometimes feel pressure to work on specific private lands leased by the shopkeepers who initially sold them their harvesting permits — out of fear that seeking other areas or buyers could get their permit revoked.
“The state and the Forest Service sell a permit directly to people in town, and they get their area,” Hoare said. “But then the larger tracks that the timber companies sell, they lease them out to people, and then those people are in charge of the land, and those people are shed owners or shop owners.”
The workers alleged that some shopkeepers will regularly check other brush sheds to see if pickers have sold somewhere else. “Technically, you should be able to sell wherever — but there’s repercussions, informal, whatever, repercussions for doing it,” Hoare explained.
Maclobio Bautista attested to this. He said that a few years ago he was caught selling to a shopkeeper other than the one who provided him his permit. Once the shopkeeper found out, Bautista had his permit revoked — and since then he’s had to pivot to cedar cutting to make a living.
“We’re technically independent contractors, but we are controlled,” Netza Olivera added. His family came to Forks in 2012 after a string of careers in the South — choosing to stay as it felt like a safe environment to raise their young children.
Due to his frustrations with the permit system and general issues with pay, Olivera said he splits his time between salal picking and cedar cutting. His wife, Norma Solano, said there’s always something to worry about in this line of work — her husband’s safety or if they can make just enough to cover their bills.
“We’re never going to be rich because they always control the price,” Olivera said.
Another woman, who asked to speak anonymously while her husband goes through immigration proceedings, remembered having to sit in on meetings where workers were warned about the possibility of running into cougars on the job. Salal harvesters can technically go pick on their own, but it’s recommended to go into the forest in groups so workers can look out for one another.
“When I first started, I didn’t know about the dangers out there,” she said, communicating through Hoare. One reason she eventually left salal picking was because she needed to prioritize her safety as a mother of young children.
Santa Mendoza Chales also noted that as independent contractors, they’re expected to cover the full cost of equipment themselves. In her 17 years as a salal picker in Forks, she said she has struggled to put away any savings. After a full day in the field, she said, communicating through Hoare, that she’s left with “very little product from this work.”
“We don’t speak English,” she said; “this is the only work we know how to do.”
Back wages and damages
As federal investigators reviewed the Continental Floral Greens vehicle crash of 2022, court records show they found broader evidence of agricultural and migrant labor violations. In a March 2024 lawsuit, the Department of Labor alleged Continental Floral Greens had failed to pay required overtime, provide safe transportation, provide proper housing and disclose pay rate details to hundreds of workers.
“Defendants have harmed not only their own employees,” the DOL complaint stated, “but also law-abiding employers who face unfair competition in the marketplace due to Defendants’ illegal practices.”
The lawsuit outlined alleged violations of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act. Investigators stated the company had “knowingly provided false or misleading information” to its workers regarding pay and working conditions.
Within days of the DOL lawsuit filing, a U.S. District Court judge in Tacoma entered a consent order requiring Continental Floral Greens to pay more than $1.8 million in back wages and damages to nearly 700 workers.
“Federal law requires employers hiring workers from outside the U.S. on temporary non-agricultural visas to ensure safe working conditions and pay the legal prevailing wage, including overtime,” a regional solicitor of labor said in the DOL news release. “Employers must also accurately represent the terms and conditions of those jobs so that U.S. workers have a full and fair opportunity to work those jobs. Continental Floral failed on all counts.”
Continental Floral Greens’ CEO James Milgard Jr. signed the consent order. Cascade PBS provided the company with a list of questions about the outcome of the case and any changes to their business practices. A company representative declined to comment.
The two workers who spoke with Cascade PBS, Hernandez Romero and Gamez Torres, both described having a hard time understanding their rights despite their visa protections. Both workers have since moved on and left the state for other work, going months without hearing any updates on their back wages from the case.
A DOL spokesperson said the agency finished processing back wage checks on the case in mid-October and the men would have to contact the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division Office in Seattle themselves, despite potential language barriers.
Just last month, the U.S. Government Accountability Office published a report that found the DOL has repeatedly struggled to get H-2A workers their owed wages in a timely manner. From 2018 to 2023, the GAO found H-2A workers accounted for 54% of wage theft cases under agricultural employers, and that the DOL did not always update workers’ contact information fast enough — making it more difficult to reach them once they’ve returned to their home countries.
“DOL has taken steps to return back wages,” the report stated, “but … has not assessed how or whether it could more efficiently locate such workers. By evaluating the costs and benefits of options to better locate workers, DOL may be able to strengthen its efforts to return back wages.”
The GAO recommended that both the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security create an end-to-end electronic processing system of H-2A visa program petitions that would serve as “an accountability mechanism” for all federal agencies involved and responsible for representing visa workers.
Working forward
Hoare said much of the brush harvesting industry remains isolated, making it more difficult for its hidden workforce to identify where they fall under the larger system of workers’ rights. That means it’s best, moving forward, for both workers and community members to seek education on their situation — and from there “they can decide where they fall in and what’s in the best interest for their work.”
“The way that we’re working as a community group is trying to facilitate and help bring information and then help folks decide how it’s best for them — like what decision overall is best for them, what changes need to be made,” she said. “But I do really believe it’s the workers who have to analyze and figure it out, because they’re the ones who truly understand the risks that they’re taking, and the benefit from the different situations.”
Workers could especially benefit from increased community involvement and organizing in places like Forks, she said, where the industry serves as an economic hub and often cycles in workers each season.
After the 2022 crash, Gamez Torres said he found agricultural work on the other side of the country. His back and leg still sear with pain anytime he tries to bend down.
“You know, you’ve got to support the family, life and kids,” he said through an interpreter. “If you’re all fucked up like this — how are you going to do it?”
Gamez Torres said a Spanish-speaking employee with Continental Floral Greens recently called him, explaining the company needed more laborers for the upcoming brush picking season. With a metered hesitation in his voice, he said he might as well take the offer.
“Any company calls you up to work, it’s a little scary, but I do it, because back in El Salvador, you can’t earn anything,” he said. “At least you can earn a little something working.”