EDITORIAL: Get To Bottom Of Abuse

By The Hartford Courant, Conn.

Feb. 15–According to a dozen Guatemalan laborers, a subcontractor named Pro Tree Forestry Services arranged for them to enter the United States with temporary work visas with the promise of a job planting pine trees near Greensboro, N.C., at $7.50 an hour. But the promise was not kept. Federal and state authorities should get to the bottom of what happened.

Pro Tree sent them to Imperial Nurseries in Granby instead, where, the laborers and their advocates say, they worked as many as 80 hours a week over three months packing trees into pots at $3.75 an hour before rent and other expenses were deducted from their pay — in apparent violation of federal and state labor laws and Connecticut criminal statutes.

No one is taking the blame for what could amount to human trafficking — not Imperial Nurseries, not Pro Tree Forestry Services, the contractor that Imperial paid to provide the workers, and not the government agencies that authorized the work visas in the first place.

There must be accountability if laws were broken. Fortunately, a group of Yale University law students cared enough to file a lawsuit on behalf of the workers. Moreover, state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal is exploring a lawsuit of his own and, depending on what he finds, a possible request that criminal charges be lodged.

Under the statutes, companies in Connecticut that engage in human trafficking could pay a civil penalty of up to $10,000 per incident. Forced labor is also a class B felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Imperial, a subsidiary of Griffin Land & Nurseries Inc., explained through an attorney and a public relations agency that a U.S. Department of Labor investigation in June found that the workers had adequate housing. Imperial said further that it was “appalled” to hear from the Labor Department that the employees were not being paid properly.

Meanwhile, representatives for Pro Tree, a company incorporated in North Carolina but whose owner lives in Tallahassee, Fla., cannot be located. The Department of Labor doesn’t have clean hands in that it had to certify the location and availability of the jobs for Pro Tree before the work visas could be issued by the State Department.

That people would so badly treat workers in this day and age is shocking.

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Copyright (c) 2007, The Hartford Courant, Conn.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.

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