MSPA
COMPLIANCE
COMPANY POLICY AND HISTORY

The Migrant Seasonal
Worker Protection Act

Some of the work our company does is covered by this act and some is not. This fact sets the stage for compliance issues that are complicated and open to interpretation of the inspectors making the inspection.
RENEWABLE FORESTRY SERVICES Inc. was one of the companies that pushed for this law to cover the reforestation industry.

In order to be awarded a Federal Contract that falls under the MSPA, the contractor must have a MSPA license.  In order to qualify for a MSPA license one must undergo a criminal background check and not have felony convictions of certain categories.  It does not cost a company any money to obtain this level of a license, but it does qualify the company to be awarded Federal contracts that are subject to MSPA. 

In order for a contractor to legally transport and or house an employee under MSPA two arenas of cost are entered, Housing and Transportation.  If an employer is going to offer housing the house must meet certain standards.  This includes:

1. Having one refrigerator for every 10 people living in the house.
2. Having one shower and bathroom for every 10 people living in the house.
3. Having screens on windows if air conditioning is not available.
4. Having at least 50 square feet of living space per bed.
5. All beds must be 12 inches off the ground.
6. Must have a clothesline for workers to hang laundry on.
7. Must have a laundry sink available for employees to use.
8. Must have a smoke detector in each bedroom and the kitchen.
9. Must have a 5 pound fire extinguisher in the kitchen, and trash cans with lids.
10. Cannot expose workers to unsafe electrical wiring.

These are the basics, but in addition to these, if a light bulb is missing out of a fixture, that is a Federal violation. If the grass is not cut or junk is piled around the home, that too is a violation.  One man’s building material is one inspector’s junk.

In the winter season of 2007/2008 the U.S. Dept of Labor performed an audit on us, both in the field and a complete review of all payrolls.

Since we supported the application of MSPA to forestry we have worked to be compliant with the law and have had at least six inspections either from U.S. DOL and or the INS.  In every inspection we have always had some issue with something, and we have always cooperated with the inspectors and worked to resolve any and all questions they have.  On a scale of 1 to 10,with 10 being the housing of crew in a place such as our Boca Chica Naval Contract.

We transported them in a diesel powered F-250 Crew Cab with Air Conditioning.

Louis Aparicio coming in the front door after a hot day into Air Conditioned comfort.

MSPA does not apply to other agencies.  The Navy was not required to check our MSPA license even though the work is labor intensive forestry.   They did indeed check the visas of our crew!

Alberto Ugalde in the kitchen. Alberto is now 60, he has been with us for 10 years.  He now has two homes built and pay for while working with us and he has put one of his sons through the Catholic Seminary School at the Vatican while working for us. Alberto can still out cut most young bucks.

On site laundry

Living room and one bedroom

We rented this 2 story, 5 bedroom town house during our Mangrove Clearing Contract for the Navy in 2005. 

We have often found that with a crew of 8 or more renting high-end is affordable.  On this contact we properly disclosed and charged the crew $65 per week for housing and transportation services.

Please note, we do not require our crew to use our services but we generally offer the best bargain in town.

When your crew is comfortable, they can perform amazing amounts of work such as clearing a mangrove swamp by hand!

This after shot shows the final pickup in the cleared swamp.

National Park Service Contracts and Fish and Wildlife Service Contracts do not mandate MSPA compliance, even though both agencies manage large sections of forest and require the same kinds of services as the U.S. Forest Service.  So while we have always maintained MSPA compliance, we have been on contracts that were not governed by MSPA, and we have at times over the years let certain parts of the license lapse.  This is generally due to simple human oversight, like forgetting to renew a driver’s license before it expires.

Our company assumed in the start of the MSPA program in forestry that in order to bring workers in from a foreign country who have no real money that the employer would be required to house and transport the workers.  To that end we rented and then purchased the house below to set up a place for our employees to live.

The structure is actually a combination of a double wide trailer (area with red porch attached) with two other buildings attached to it. Starting with the baywindows and the rest of the two story structure the first order of work was to wire the section as it had zero functional wiring when we first least the house. Over the last year we have now rewired most of the original double wide section of the home including new wire and a new breaker box coming from the meter box. (It helps to have an retired industrial electrician in the family, Jill's dad)

Typical rooms in the crewhouse.

We have always had to work on a small budget, since our competition completely avoided this issue. Funds had to come from our bank and or contract earnings.  The decision at the federal level to allow for the hiring of migrants and temporary guest workers without insuring that the company was providing housing and transportation services has continued to depress prices in this industry. The issuing of a MSPA license without “officially” providing housing and transportation services to forest conservation workers has made finding the money to make upgrades difficult.  Thus when one looks at our list of completed contracts one will see that we have spent most of the last decade on more complex environmental restoration contacts that have allowed us to make improvements on the crew-house and setup housing such as what we did in Key West for our crews.

We have spent Tens of thousands of dollars maintaining housing and transportation standards for over a decade in spite of the fact that most of our industry’s competition simply avoids the issue by hiding behind their pay disclosures, saying that they do not control housing or transportation so if the crew is living 8 to 10 men in a 12x60 foot trailer, or riding in a van with bad tires or worn out shocks, it is not the contractor’s fault.
This veil has existed for the entire time we have been using migrant and H2B workers from Mexico and other counties.

In the last 15 years we have generally been inspected about every 3 years.  And like a restaurant being inspected by the health department, making a 100 is hard to do.  Generally speaking, I would rank our inspections with a grade of 85 to 95.  But to quote DOL inspector Delgado, “I can always find something to bust a company on.”  It’s true, one screen window missing or out of place is a violation, un-cut grass is a violation, etc.

So we have done a compliance dance with the U.S. DOL for some 15 plus years over standards that many in our industry simply avoid.  It is true that many forestry contractors now seek certification to transport but we do not know of any who have made the efforts to purchase and maintain a house and supply a decent place for people to live.  Since most of our work is away from our hometown, our crew house services as a base.  If crew is between contracts we do not charge anything for housing and transport services, if it is an extended period of time.  Crew is also welcomed to fish at our family pond located on our tract of land adjoining the crewhouse.

So, in our last audit we were cited for housing violations.  The summer before our fall season started, we were given a nice ranch home in Buckhead (north Atlanta) to take down for materials by one of our tree farmer clients.

When Inspector Brock showed up he saw the house in repair mode and cited us for a number of violations.  None of which posed a real danger to the crew as the wiring he thought was “exposed wiring” had no power in the circuits.  Nevertheless we refunded the housing that we had charged the crew, (even though in actuality they were in a motel in Pierson GA for most weeks for which we were cited) finished up the repairs, and we had Mr. Delgado come back and re-inspect the house.  He agreed once again that the house was in good order and overall is a sound crew house.  Since his visit we have continued to make improvements on the house from the materials we obtained.

New kitchen cabinets and ceramic tile back splash.

Upper shot of cabinets

We created an eight eye stove

Next we remodeled the bathrooms.  The ceramic tile is all new, and the sink and toilets are from the house we took down. 

This bath was redone as well.  The house as 3 bathrooms one with a shower and a shower room with washer and dryer.

The Oak flooring came from the house in Atlanta as well.  It was installed on plywood that was glued to a cement floor.  We cut it into large sheets, some as wide as 7 feet and up to 15 feet long and loaded onto our goose neck trailer and then stacked it on the front porch of the crew house.  Like I said, one mans gold is fits on inspectors goal.  Find something to fuss about.  So Mr. Brock we invite you to revisit the crew house at any time.

For years we have had these gas heaters mounted on sheetrock walls, which is to code but I have never liked it.  We had this stone cut for the outside of our home, and in the language process some was cut one foot by one foot not one foot by sixteen inches as we thought we had ordered.  So I decided to make good use of it by covering may of the interior walls of the crew house with the stone where I have gas heaters mounted. 

The stoned covered wall with heater is in this room with the new floor from the house in Atlanta.

In all we refloored four rooms in the crewhouse with the Oak.

Looks better and is safer.

This is a new wall that now creates 3 fully separate bedrooms in one end of the house. We put saltillo tiles in the hallway and installed a new heater mounted on a newly stoned wall to heat this end of the crew house.

While it is expensive and time consuming to install the stone and clay tile adds a whole new level of fire prevention.  Quite the upgrade from sagged carpet over particle board subfloor.  The original home was a double wide trailer that was built on when the former owner added the two houses to make the one rather huge crew house.

The house sites on 17 acres of land and our family farm boarders it to the west.

From supplying the crew with quality housing to tranquil fishing we believe in taking care of our people.  For they make the company and the list of completed contracts you see would have never happened with out a core crew of reliable forest conservation workers.