Guest workers win in court over low pay

Workers, for their part, are not inclined to complain since many hand over deeds to their homes as part of the hiring process. Also, many make $400 a week in the woods – a fortune back home in their remote mountain communities.

The pineros ruling, which could cost Eller & Sons $5 million in back wages, could present a major problem for the forest industry. For one, the workers have set new standards for productivity. American workers used to plant 800 trees a day. The Guatemalan workers often plant 2,500, sometimes 4,000, trees a day. Meanwhile, they make about half what the American workers did even in the 1990s.

"The prevailing sense [among contractors] is that we can't ever go back because foreign labor has raised the production bar so high that American workers are never going to be able to compete," says Vanessa Casanova, an anthropology lecturer at the University of Texas in Brownsville, who has studied the pineros for nearly a decade.

The question of what kind of work Americans are willing to do and for how much – especially during times of unemployment – is increasingly a factor as Congress mulls expanding guest worker programs as part of major immigration reform.

Rural Southern communities that border the pine plantations are some of America's poorest. Nearly 30 percent of people in the Black Belt, for instance, live below the poverty line.

Jobs for Americans

It's possible to find US workers for a $13-an-hour prevailing wage, says Ms. Bauer, who works for the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights firm in Montgomery, Ala. "But [guest workers] are not getting anywhere near $13. It's grueling work and people are getting cheated. In time, then, it's true that US workers wouldn't do the work for these wages."

Timber companies rarely hire undocumented workers, instead lobbying Congress to increase the number of H-2B workers allowed into the country. One effect of the rulings could be that contractors go farther afield to find workers who can be exploited, says Ms. Casanova.

Ghanian workers, for example, are becoming more common on pine plantations as Hispanic workers seek redress.

But as guest worker abuses come to light and the economy shows signs of worsening, immigration critics such as Bob Dane at the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) in Washington says Congress needs to drastically re-think the guest worker programs.

"These are tough economic times, and I think it's the responsibility of the federal government to increase availability of well-paying jobs domestically," says Mr. Dane. "And yet we seem to be moving constantly in the other direction, opening up opportunities for permanent and temporary foreign workers to come in."

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