Tree planting sure isn’t what it once was

[newb]

Tree planting sure isn’t what it once was - Romance of the wilderness is still there, but not the big financial rewards
BY BETHANY LINDSAY, VANCOUVER SUN

http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Tr ... story.html

[RPF]

I just read the article online and found a couple of interesting quotes:

"During a typical pay period, 68 per cent of fieldworkers reported earnings that translate to less than minimum wage. About 10 per cent said they earned between $20 and $26 an hour."

"Even during their best pay periods, nearly half of field workers reported earning under minimum wage, and 57-per-cent said they brought in $15 or less per hour"

Are those quotes accurate? And if so, where are those planters working? And even more importantly, why are those individuals subjecting themselves to such brutal labour for so little pay?

In my experience working with tree planters on the coast, I'm usually the lowest paid person on the block when I'm doing quality checks - and believe me I'm earning way more than minimum wage.

For those workers earning less than minimum wage, I hope the contractors that those people are working for are topping up their wages as per legislation. Assuming that those contractors are honest and topping up wages, the question then becomes, why are those contractors allowing low wage earners to remain on their payroll? To me this would be an added cost of doing business that I wouldn't want to deal with.

Am I missing something? just curious.

[Pandion]

Really, Brinkman complaining about decreasing planter wages. How many formerly high paying contracts have gone to Brinkmart over the years, resulting in much lower tree prices for planters?

[Evergreen]

Bashing Brinkmart is always a popular pastime but obviously the problem is much more wide spread than that. The numbers in those quotes are unbelievable and really do beg the question - why would people put up with wages like that? It seems that regardless of the Khaira fiasco, the government has no will to make sure young workers know their rights, make minimum wage at least or get paid on time. Out of sight, out of mind is apparently working just fine thank you.

The wages being reported in the Vancouver Sun surely can't be real?? If they are, then there's two very different worlds of planting in B.C. Perhaps we could draw a line from Golden, following the Trans Canada and the 51st parallel. South of this line planters for the most part are making reasonable wages. If we believe the Sun numbers, planters to the north are getting totally screwed. Or is it that experienced planters north of the 51st are doing okay but rookies are being taken to the cleaners?

Either way, somebody is reaping the benefits of the sweat and hard labour of naïve young workers. Having intently watched the prices that work goes for in this province, I don't see that the big evil contractors are getting rich, skimming large amounts of money off the top. Contract prices are so low that there just isn't that kind of largesse available. The sad thing is that the money that ought to be going to the workers is being saved by government and the big multinational logging companies. I've harped on it for a long time. As long as we in the world of planting remain unorganized both on a planter and a contractor level, we will be patsies for the big organized companies and government.

[jdtesluk]

I am confident that the numbers are wrong. I am unsure if this is a matter of bad data collection or faulty interpretation of the data. However, it is incorrect beyond a shadow of a doubt. Production this low would bring the industry to a screeching halt pretty damned fast. Companies simply could not stay in business or complete jobs with entire crews requiring wage top-ups, and fielding truck after truck of $100-a-day workers. If you just think about it for a moment, it becomes clear that the writer of the article is completely out of touch...perhaps well-meaning to address what they perceive as a problem (and as a good news story with previous headline value), but woefully detached from the reality of the industry.

That being said, there are certainly examples out there of workers making less than minimum. I am unsure of the practices with all companies, but I have seen many cases of companies topping up wages. I have not seen or heard of anything resembling Khaira in a long while. I am aware of isolated cases of specific shirking of specific requirements, but the suggestion of widespread non-compliance is horribly inaccurate.


I simply have not had the time to follow up on this one personally, but I aim to follow through on this, because I have a bit of a thing for data on this subject.

[salbrecher]

My guess is the author used to portal to portal hours for the workday and averaged the earnings over that.

[RPF]

I am confident that the numbers are wrong. I am unsure if this is a matter of bad data collection or faulty interpretation of the data. However, it is incorrect beyond a shadow of a doubt. Production this low would bring the industry to a screeching halt pretty damned fast. Companies simply could not stay in business or complete jobs with entire crews requiring wage top-ups, and fielding truck after truck of $100-a-day workers. ...

I simply have not had the time to follow up on this one personally, but I aim to follow through on this, because I have a bit of a thing for data on this subject.

Yeah, this article didn't make sense to me either.

Regardless, many readers of the Vancouver Sun will take this at face value, which will only further tarnish an already negative view of the forest industry that many people in the public already have. It's very unfortunate that the reporter didn't clue in that the numbers that were reported seemed out of whack and dig deeper into the details before publishing the article. But I guess if they did, it would make for a boring story and no one would want to read about it.

Then again, perhaps the data that the reporter had was accurate. However, like all data, it can be manipulated to suit whatever opinion or point of view you want to express. It's just unfortunate that the general public is left with a negative impression of the whole thing.

[Mike]

It seems like this article was based on the Tyee article?

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=66516

to which I responded:

According to the most recent Labour Market Index, three-quarters of planters across the province earned $16 per hour or less during the 2014 planting season, while only 10 per cent of tree planters drew the high earnings [300$/day] of their predecessors.

16$/hour * 12 hours = 192$/day. 3/4ths of planters don't make 200$/day? Only 10% of planters are averaging 300$/day? Where is this Labour Market Index, and how is it's numbers generated?

The same data indicates that last year, there were some instances where silviculture field workers earned less than minimum wage. On their worst pay period, 87 per cent of workers report earnings below B.C.'s minimum wage.*

Seriously? 87%? I want to read the source data, badly.

I agree with Jordan: These numbers can't possibly be accurate. Even in an industry that's a full 50% rookies (which is probably a generous estimation), that would me half the remaining vets don't make 200$/day.

Someone gave me a link to:
http://bcbushwhacker.com/wp-content/upl ... esults.pdf . Don't have time to through it at the moment

[newb]

From the article

"It’s hard to measure how far the average tree planter’s earnings have fallen in recent years, but the Western Silvicultural Contractors’ Association has taken a stab at it. The group makes a yearly estimate by comparing the amount of money paid by the industry to the number of trees planted; the vast majority of jobs are piecework."

"A survey conducted by the B.C. Silviculture Workforce Initiative at the end of the last planting system revealed that tree planters work long hours — about a third said their days lasted up to 14 hours — for pay that can be underwhelming."

Google search for "B.C. Silviculture Workforce Initiative Survey" will bring you to http://bcbushwhacker.com/, where you can download the survey results.

http://bcbushwhacker.com/wp-content/upl ... esults.pdf

I believe that this viewtopic.php?p=86091 is how they collected some of the data.

[Thomas]

Actually, I don't imagine these numbers are so inaccurate, when you consider how they are calculating minimum wage, thinking bout how bad BCTS prices are, and how many rookies there are in this industry. When you say 16$ an hour times 12 hours, you aren't using the same method they do, which is to calculate overtime pay. It's not 16*12=192, it's 16*8 + 16*1.5*4=224. So if you plant 10 hours, with an hour of portal time on each end, and only make 224$, which, for the BCTS contract I was just working with a large company which has a reputation of being a rookie mill, was a decent day for a vet, you really were only working for 16$ an hour on average,even if you plant at rate of about 25$ an hour when actually in the field.

Let's do some more math. I was planting tough-ish ground on BCTS recently, as a fifth-year vet, for as low as 10.75 cents near Vanderhoof. A good day for that contract, for a decent hard working vet, was 2500. Not even 300$. Rookies, in their first month, may have put in 800 -1500 on normal days, and on bad days, vets were putting in that much, or maybe a little more, but not much more than 1500 on some days. If a rookie put in 1200 at 10.75, that's 129$ in 12 hours, which is equal to 9.21$ an hour, if you factor in overtime pay at 1.5 times normal pay. A vet putting in 1700 at the price would make 182.75. At eight hours normal pay plus four hours at time and a half, that's equal to a wage rate of 13.05 per hour. I imagine that the WCSA numbers are taking into account prices before their all-inclusive price with 4% vac and 3.6% stat pay factored in, which would explain how low the rates re again-technically those aren't part of your actual wage total.

So really, if most rookie companies have 40% rookies, are working for 10-12 cents for raw ground at BCTS, and are working 12-hour days portal to portal, these numbers are probably actually pretty accurate.

Note that not all of the planting I am doing this season is like that-as we have left BC and are now planting in Cochrane, my average was is now around 300$ a day. But I think a lot of you don't know how it is for most planting companies, when you factor in how many large rookie mill camps there are in BC planting BCTS contracts.

So why don't people leave, you ask?
-rookies have never had a job where they get to be away from parents and responsibilities (maybe true for vets also), so they experience freedom and are having too much fun to realize how much life sucks
-people don't come to Replant and learn how much rookies and vets should be making in this industry
-no company in the city will let you work 60 hours a week, even at minimum wage, so the money seems good when you don't think about how long the hours are even if you don't make more than 15$ an hour
-people have too much fun; you have too many friends you don't think about how little money you are making
-your supervisor doesn't fire you for being drunk in town on day off.

[jdtesluk]

I'm curious why you are calculating minimal wage as $16.00 per hour. I think most of us are well aware of the proper way to calculate overtime for planting. However, the provincial minimum wage is $10.25............unless of course you are talking about the moral minimum wage

[Mike]

Also, even if Thomas' description is accurate for 60% of the industry, the remaining 40% would drag the average up substantially.

Still need to go through the raw data myself.

[jdtesluk]

Data collection in the industry is very sensitive to chronological (seasonal), geographical, and organizational sampling considerations. These, among other factors, make it challenging (but not impossible) to come up with good figures.

[Scooter]

From today's WSCA Newsletter:

Hit and Myth Coverage of Tree Planting Continues in Provincial Press

The Vancouver Sun ran a recent article on tree planting taking a different tack than the Province’s June 2014 article (do they take turns?) on the big bucks to be had working hard planting trees. The Sun more or less said the opposite; that most people don’t make the big bucks. It ain’t what it used to be was the central theme. Both articles are somewhat true suggesting that planting trees can exist as an ongoing contradiction in many ways. Unfortunately the Sun got one thing wrong. It reported that 68 percent of the workforce earned less than minimum wage. This is hardly likely. The source of the error was a misread of our 2015 Worker Survey. The actual figure is that 68 percent of the workforce reported earning less than minimum wage in one pay period. Totally different point to make with totally different implications. Nevertheless it can be said, and we have heard it often, people are working harder than they used to.

[jdtesluk]

Fascinating. This begs the question (again), whether or not all companies are topping up pay as required by law. I continue to find no language in the legislation that allows "topping up of wages" to be done over a pay period. The language and guidelines in 37.9 of the ESA indicates it must be done every day. Technically, it should be impossible for a worker to make less than minimal wage in any given day, let alone any pay period. This needs to stop.

[Scooter]

I'm a huge supporter of the minimum wage top-up regulations, but I don't think that trying to apply it on a daily basis would be positive. You'd see a lot of workers who are having a bad day for whatever reason (rain, miss their boyfriend/girlfriend, or a hundred other reasons) decide, "well, I'm not going to make minimum wage today anyway, I may as well just sit at the cache for the rest of the day." As soon as you have that situation, the only solution would be for the company to discipline and eventually terminate the worker's employment. That's not constructive for anyone. Also, you'd see situations where an employee who is making say around $150 per day and needing around $139 per day (for an 11 hour day) to meet top-up start scheming on ways to taken advantage of the system, ie. claim two less boxes than you plant on Thursday, then claim them on Friday. It would be all sorts of headaches, and I couldn't imagine how to start dealing with them.

I'd be pretty happy just to see a situation where EVERY company in the industry pays out top-up properly. There are still several companies not doing it.

[Gingerplanter]

The problem is that companies that take advantage of the 4 year university planter. These companies have a large base for employment that happen to be temporary workers. With planters not staying long they can get away with having reduced prices because of the influx of new student employees will always fill the void. Due to this access of new employees, career planters are unable to generate action to raise prices due to the fear of losing their job to some part-time university scab.

[puppywolverine]

There are hearsay type of rumours around Campbell River that the tree pricing pressure is coming from inside. The industry is rumoured to be circling the seed tree method in a mode of action where the tree planter would carry a modified seedling tray and plant the seed trees at a much larger spacing distance of course.

The pricing may be designed for the industry to devote more money towards pruning and spacing.

At the risk of speaking in the first person: after being ravaged by the mafia ass space holes in this country keeping manual workers unemployed with astronomical levels of harassment towards potential employers right up to mangling business licences and speculation of stealing cra money etc, I myself am game more or less to consider low paying reforestation better than becoming destitute--if there were more jobs available snow to snow so to speak.