A Fundamentalist East Texas Church Bought a Sawmill. Injuries and Child Labor Violations Began to Pile Up. - Texas Monthly
A Fundamentalist East Texas Church Bought a Sawmill. Injuries and Child Labor Violations Began to Pile Up.
Almost 25 percent of severe injuries at mills in the state since 2017 have occurred at a single facility, owned by members of the Church of Wells.
On a humid July afternoon, two investigators from the Texas Workforce Commission's Child Labor Law Unit pulled into the red-dirt parking lot of Custom Cut Lumber, a sawmill located in Alto, amid the Piney Woods about an hour south of Tyler. They walked onto the seventeen-acre property strewn with milled planks, piles of sawdust, and unhewn logs, and headed toward the main building. Richard Gordon Trudeau, a stocky man with an auburn beard and a soft, raspy voice, came to greet them in the sawmill's pine-paneled office. Samples of wooden trim hung on the wall. Card stock religious tracts and CDs sat propped on a shelf, and affixed to the window was a photocopied Bible verse, Romans 8:24: "For we are saved by hope, but hope that is seen is not hope, for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for?"
Trudeau serves as an elder in the Church of Wells—an insular fundamentalist religious group that some consider a cult—and has owned the land the mill sits upon since 2014. The investigators explained to him, on the day of their visit in 2018, that they had received an anonymous tip to a state hotline alleging that boys as young as eleven were working at the mill—a violation of state and federal child labor laws—and were in immediate danger. Trudeau, who was then 35, confirmed that at least four minors worked on the property, but said he was unsure of the total number and exactly how old they were.
One of those children was a gangly eleven-year-old, "Trevor." (His and his parents' names have been changed at the family's request to protect their privacy.) An only child, Trevor started working at the sawmill in March 2018, according to his father. Some days, he would stack and sort wood in the scragg mill area, where short logs are hewn. After the logs were cut, Trevor and other boys would pull them off a conveyor belt, separate the good pieces from ones that were misshapen or marred by knots, and stack them into neat piles. "I would do some sorting for a few minutes . . . but my main job was just stacking the wood," he told investigators on the phone in August as they continued their inquiry, according to Texas Workforce Commission documents obtained via a public records request.
Trevor's family had joined the Church of Wells in August 2017, and the boy was wary of doing anything to anger anyone in the group, so in that phone call he withheld one particularly unsettling experience from the investigators. One afternoon that spring, Trevor had been sorting planks when a log became jammed in the scragg mill's power saw, causing a large blade to suddenly break off and fly through the air. "It could have cut my head off," Trevor told me in February 2020. "Thank God it didn't."
The investigators interviewed the other boys who worked at the mill, levied a fine against its operators, and then dropped out of contact. For Trevor and his parents, "Adam" and "Paula," the incident marked the beginning of the end of their time in Wells. But the tip that prompted that initial probe was just the first of several that officials would investigate. In December 2021, new complaints surfaced about an underage boy working at a trim shop in Wells owned and operated by church members. Meanwhile, injuries among the mill's adult workers eventually attracted the notice of government agencies.
In 2002, Adam, who studied economics and culinary arts as an undergraduate in his native Peru, came to the U.S. on a work visa to cook aboard Royal Caribbean cruise ships. He soon found life at sea monotonous and transferred within the company to a position based in port. He settled into life in Miami and began attending a Hispanic Baptist church. There, in 2005, he met Paula, a Brazilian immigrant enrolled in beauty school, when she sought him out to compliment him on the turkey he had cooked as part of the church's Thanksgiving meal. They married in 2006, and that December Trevor was born. Adam and Paula became naturalized citizens and bought a three-bedroom condo overlooking a canal in Tamarac, a northwestern suburb of Fort Lauderdale at the edge of the Everglades.
After completing a master's degree in education in 2013, Adam did not find work in his field. Instead, he started an airport shuttle business and sold Herbalife products to support his family and pay off his student loans. One day in 2017, he reconnected with a childhood friend from Lima who told him he had recently become part of a group of "biblical Christians" in Texas. His friend, who was visiting Miami to pick up a newly recruited family, encouraged Adam to come to the small town of Wells, fifteen minutes south of Alto, to see this church for himself. Adam often found that in his busy Miami life he could not carve out time for God; he frequently opted to work the lucrative Sunday shuttle shift instead of going to church.The idea of a quieter life in Texas among a group of committed Christians appealed to him. "[My friend] started talking to me about the Church of Wells, and how all the other churches are fake," Adam said. "Somehow, he convinced me."
What his friend didn't tell Adam was that the daily lives of the 250-plus members of the Church of Wells are controlled and circumscribed by the church's three founders,who call themselves elders—Jacob Gardner, Sean Morris, and Ryan Ringnald. The elders have a say in everything from living arrangements to who marries whom to where and when one can travel. The group's services are closed to outsiders, and children in the church are homeschooled. Vaccination is prohibited for congregants. ("There are elements, fundamental elements of vaccines themselves, that are against nature, other natural laws, and other things that God's word says," Morris said in an October 2018 sermon. The elders did not respond to a question about their stance on vaccination.)
Members, who believe themselves among the only truly saved Christians in the world, view salvation as slippery—something that they are at constant risk of losing whenever they commit what the elders consider sins, including watching television, wearing tight clothing, or practicing judo. (Social media, a recruitment tool, is allowed.) Many members are only in sporadic contact with their parents and extended families, as I wrote in my 2014 Texas Monthly story on the group, "Sinners in the Hands." (Much of that contact is directed by the elders. "Brethren, Please be aware that today is *Mother's Day*, according to the heathen, thus it would be wise to honor your mother by communicating your love," Morris wrote in a May 2018 WhatsApp message to members.)
In July 2017, when he and his family were still living in Tamarac, Adam decided to take his friend up on his offer to visit his church. Adam, Paula, and Trevor spent a week in East Texas seeking the Lord, hearing personal testimonies of salvation, and sharing communal meals with members.Adam was impressed by the deep faith of the "brethren," as the members refer to one another, and marveled at their grasp of the Bible, as many of them were able to quote verse after verse from memory. After hearing his testimony, the elders proclaimed that Adam was saved, and, seeing the appeal of life in this tight-knit community, he decided his family needed to join the church.
They drove back to Tamarac to pack their belongings into a moving truck and put their condo on the market. They returned to Wells less than a week later, buying a mobile home and a small piece of land in town. "The Lord changes your plans sometimes," Adam told me in August 2019. "He changed all my plans and he moved us to Texas."A month later, Morris baptized Adam in Lake Nacogdoches.
When Adam said he needed to find a job, church members told him, "No worry. We have a mill. Work there," he recounted. Within days he was employed at Custom Cut Lumber.
The Church of Wells's founding elders met in the mid 2000s in Waco, where Morris and Ringnald were undergraduates at Baylor University and Gardner attended community college. The young men bonded over their shared affinity for the King James Bible and their puritanical view of an often-angry God. After Morris and Ringnald graduated in 2008, the trio spent a couple of itinerant years preaching on street corners and colleges around the country, before setting up a base in an Arlington, Texas, house owned by Morris's older brother Jesse, who had also joined the church. Bit by bit, their church grew. Those who sought to join first had to spend time "seeking the Lord," before facing an "examination" during which the elders determined whether or not they were saved, a process several former church members say involves prostrating oneself and professing to hate one's previous sinful life.
In 2012, the group relocated to Wells, where housing was cheap, and leased the R&R Mercantile, a convenience store, gas station, and restaurant on U.S. 69, to support themselves. Trudeau incorporated an entity called Charity Enterprises to run the R&R, listing nine church members, including the three founding elders and himself, as directors. Behind the store, Trudeau, who had owned a woodshop in upstate New York before joining the group, helped set up a small sawmill. In the summer of 2014, locals who were fed up with how Church of Wells members were antagonizing residents—declaring local preachers "false prophets," telling young children they were hell-bound, and disrupting the homecoming parade—organized a boycott of the church-run businesses. The boycott led Trudeau to shutter the store and relocate the mill to some land he had purchased in the nearby town of Alto.
The move, church members believe, was ordained by the Lord. Two tornadoes tore through Alto in April 2019, injuring twenty, razing more than a dozen homes, and downing thousands of trees, but inflicting no damage on the mill. "A business in the church was literally YARDS away from the destruction, but had no damage whatsoever! It is truly a blessing to be under the protective covering of Christ," one member posted on Facebook. Trudeau stood by the town's main intersection to hold up a placard. "Who has His way in the Whirlwind? Nahum 1:3," the sign read. "Fear God and give him glory!"
Today, the business, which the brethren sometimes refer to as "the Lord's mill," has become the main economic engine of the church. It is operated by a limited liability corporation called Custom Cut Lumber (CCL), whose manager is a church member, Gregory Sean Sanders, according to filings with the Texas Secretary of State. Before December 31, 2020, the mill was operated in the same location by a limited partnership called Whirlwind Lumber Productions (WLP), whose manager was also Sanders as of 2019, according to a contract with the mill's electricity provider. Eric Kolder, a lawyer for the mill, wrote that the two entities "do not have identical ownership or management," but declined to answer questions about who owned and controlled each business.
In January of 2022, Kolder said the mill employed more than ten workers, without specifying the precise total; according to Texas Workforce Commission documents, it employed 44 people in February 2021. At least half are church members, while the rest are outsiders—drawn from Alto, Wells, and other nearby small towns. In 2020, the mill cut seven million board feet of wood, according to Trudeau. Adam, who was hired in a bookkeeping role in August 2017, told me that in recent years the mill has generated about $2 million in annual revenue and $500,000 in annual profit.
After taking the job, Adam soon noticed what he considered to be improprieties in the mill's finances that he said would result in trouble if the Internal Revenue Service were to conduct a thorough audit. He said sawmill funds were regularly used to buy plane tickets to ferry church members to and from its international branches in Peru (the Church of Lima) and Australia (the Church of Adelaide). These tickets—sometimes for entire families with four or five young children—were written off as business expenses, and the outlays began to eat into the mill's profits. Adam said some sawmill funds also were redirected to pay the three elders' personal cellphone and utility bills, though none of them worked there. But early on, when Adam raised these issues with Trudeau, he said he was told not to worry about them. (Kolder responded to questions sent to Sanders and Trudeau and denied that sawmill funds were used to pay for plane tickets for church members or for the elders' personal expenses, but said that all three men have "worked for the mill at different times in the past as independent contractors." Gardner, Morris, and Ringnald did not respond to questions about what kind of work they did at the mill and when.)
Beyond these alleged financial improprieties, Adam was alarmed by the number of workers who would come inside the sawmill office to have work-related injuries evaluated. At least twenty injuries—including to members of the church and to workers from the broader community—have occurred at the mill since 2017, ranging from fractured toes to amputated fingertips, according to interviews and documents.
Many mill employees who are not church members are vulnerable because of their criminal history, education level, or poverty. Some former employees told me they were paid cash under the table, without deductions for federal income and payroll taxes, though Kolder denied that WLP and CCL have ever done so. All of this made these employees less likely to report their injuries or pursue legal action. Under Texas law, employers are not required to carry workers' compensation insurance, but without such coverage a company can be sued by employees who are injured at work. Custom Cut Lumber obtained a workers' compensation policy only on January 21, 2021, according to the Texas Department of Insurance. That policy ended after one year, and, as of press time, the mill did not have coverage. Kolder wrote that the company is in the process of reapplying for workers' compensation insurance after the person who handled the matter at CCL died last year.
Some injured workers were given raises and light duties while they recovered, according to interviews with multiple men injured at the mill. Others weren't given much—as Adam learned when he slipped on sawdust on the office stairs and tore a ligament in his knee, in October 2018. When he asked for help paying for his surgery, Trudeau and Sanders declined, though they eventually covered half the cost of his magnetic resonance imaging scan, Adam said. (Kolder told me that in his clients' recollection, Adam opted to use his own "good private insurance" to cover his medical bills. Adam said he did not have insurance at the time.)
In his kitchen in Lufkin in February 2020, Adam explained Trudeau and Sanders's rationale: "They said, 'We're not paying because it was the judgment of the Lord,'" Adam recounted. "There must be some sin in your life . . . or the Lord would not allow it to happen.'" Adam initially internalized this way of thinking. "Praise God for His blessed chastisements," he wrote in an October 2018 WhatsApp message to church members about his knee.
When he started at the mill, Adam would marvel at how adeptly one lean eleven-year-old laborer handled the tools that hung from his leather belt. "I was born in a rich family in Peru," Adam told me. "My father trained my head and not my hands." He said he wanted his son Trevor to learn those other skills too. And so, in March 2018, Trevor joined the other boys at the mill, earning $8 an hour that was added to his father's paycheck. Trevor would work a four-hour shift two mornings a week.
Paula was alarmed, and later claimed in a document filed in a family court proceeding that Trevor had been "forced as an 11 year old boy to work in a dangerous sawmill." She worried too that her son's education was being neglected. Instead of attending school full-time, Trevor, after his morning shifts, received homeschool lessons during two-hour stints in a small shed next to the sawmill kitchen. Patricia Scofield, a church member who had trained as a teacher before joining the group, taught him from Christian workbooks that Adam purchased.
Once the Texas Workforce Commission investigators showed up, Trevor and the other boys stopped coming to the mill. Randall Valdez, who ran the sawmill's operations at the time, penned a letter to the investigators in August to defend the mill's actions. "We, as Christians, desire that our sons will both have a good education and the ability to work with us. This is primarily to help them become men," Valdez wrote. "Our practice is to keep them away from jobs that would be considered hazardous in accordance with what I understood to be the law."
But the investigators determined that many of the tasks the boys performed were hazardous. They fed wood into the machines and removed freshly cut planks from the conveyor belts. One of the eleven-year-olds told investigators that he ran the saw while the men were on break and sometimes operated the forklift. (Federal regulations expressly bar anyone younger than eighteen from operating power-driven woodworking machines or a forklift.) In one photo taken in July before the investigators came, Trevor—wearing ear protection, gloves, and safety goggles—uses a "bark spud," a long tool with a sharp blade, to scrape bark off a log. Another eleven-year-old without any protective equipment can be seen in the photo working alongside him. Both boys wear red "Custom Cut Lumber" shirts.
The state's child labor investigators ultimately found that three minor boys —Trevor, the other eleven-year-old, and one thirteen-year-old—had been placed at a "great level of risk" through their work at the mill, in violation of the section of the Texas Labor Code that prohibits children younger than fourteen from most employment. They found that another seventeen-year-old had been employed at the mill in violation of federal and state regulations that bar minors ages sixteen or seventeen from work in certain hazardous occupations, including logging and sawmill operations. Using an "administrative penalty assessment" worksheet that weighs various factors, including the seriousness of the violation and the determination that the mill's operators were not aware of the law, the investigators levied a $1,232.50 fine in January 2019. (Under state law they could have levied penalties as large as $10,000 per violation.) The mill paid the fine at the end of the month. Kolder confirmed that payment, adding that WLP "complied with the caseworker's recommendation." CCL "operates in strict compliance with state and federal" child labor laws, he wrote.
Adam told me he was not aware that Trevor's working at the mill violated child labor laws, and described feeling "uncomfortable" upon learning this from the TWC investigators. "I never wanted to break the law," he told me. Yet he maintains that the work experience benefited his son. "It was really good for [Trevor] and the other kids. Of course it was dangerous. But they started seeing the importance of work," he told me. "[Trevor] learned a lot of things that, when he was in Florida, he never did."
This month, TWC fined another business run by church members for a child labor violation involving one of the boys named in the 2018 investigation. In a series of videos captured by a concerned Wells resident, that boy, who is now sixteen, can be seen outside Custom Cut Millwork, an interior trim shop located in the former R&R Mercantile building in Wells. According to TWC records, the business is owned by Moses David, the father-in-law of elder Sean Morris. (Kolder said the trim shop is operated by a separate company. The shop's address was listed on Custom Cut Lumber's website in January 2022 but was removed after Kolder was asked about it.) In the videos, the child stands on a wood kiln loading planks onto a waiting forklift and adjusting a lever on the machine when the man driving it appears to have trouble operating it. In other parts of the videos, he acts younger than his age, swinging playfully on the tines of the forklift.
After interviewing the boy and learning he had used an air-powered nail gun and engaged the parking brake of the forklift, the TWC investigator found that the trim shop employed the boy in violation of two provisions of federal child labor law and fined the business $170 in early March. David did not respond to questions about the investigation. Ronnie Saltsman, a church member who is the manager of Custom Cut Millwork, sent a letter to the TWC acknowledging the violation and apologizing for it. "It is now our policy that minors are not allowed to work here ever," Saltsman wrote.
The problems at Custom Cut Lumber extend beyond child labor violations. Multiple workers who have been employed on the property told me that the equipment is operated without proper machine guards and that "lockout, tagout" procedures—safety protocols that ensure equipment is shut down and rendered inoperable during maintenance—are not regularly used. (Kolder disputed these allegations, writing that the company works with a workplace-safety consultant to "ensure compliance with all [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] safety standards, including Lockout and Tagout Systems." He did not respond to a question asking him to identify the consultant.) New hires, some former employees say, start work without receiving any formal safety training. The church members who run the mill "basically say they put safety in God's hands," says Chris Payne, a Wells resident who spent a year working at Custom Cut from 2018 to 2019 but does not belong to the church.
Gregory Sean Sanders, the church member who now manages the facility, is keenly aware of the dangers at the mill. On September 6, 2017, he was servicing a machine that had not been locked out. Another worker, who didn't notice that a repair was underway, turned the machine on. Sanders's hand caught in a pulley, resulting in a compound fracture to his left arm that required surgery, including the insertion of plates and screws. "Blood squirted everywhere," one eyewitness to the injury told me. "He was laying on the ground holding his arm, praising God for the correction." (Members of the Church of Wells believe that God "chastens" or "corrects" those he loves.) Sanders did not respond to a question about whether he was hospitalized as a result of this injury.
Even after Sanders's injury, lockout procedures weren't regularly implemented, five workers told me. In August 2018, Troy Dannenberger, a church member who works at the mill, wrote on a WhatsApp chat for sawmill employees, "[W]e need training on lockout, tagout. A machine should never be able to be turned on that someone is working on. It's is suppose [sic] to be locked out." (Kolder did not respond to a question on whether lockout-tagout training was conducted at the mill following Sanders's injury.)
Even a well-run sawmill presents myriad hazards. OSHA does not mince words on its website, writing, "Working in a sawmill is one of the most dangerous occupations in the United States." But the rate of injury at Custom Cut Lumber exceeds that of the industry at large.
OSHA regulations require employers with more than ten employees on their payroll—hourly, part-time, seasonal, and temporary workers included—to track all workplace injuries and illnesses that need medical treatment beyond first aid in an "OSHA 300" log. This log must be retained for five years and must be presented to a federal inspector or employee upon request.
Kolder said that Whirlwind Lumber Productions was not required to keep an OSHA 300 log because the company never had more than 10 employees. But, in August 2018, a TWC child labor investigator recorded that the sawmill had 22 employees. In April 2020, Whirlwind Lumber Productions certified that the company had 21 employees when it applied for and received a $84,492 loan through the federal Paycheck Protection Program. And a review of an internal WhatsApp chat group titled "Sawmill Hours Turn in" spanning from late 2017 to early 2019 reveals that, on average, 15 church members worked at the mill each week for hourly pay. (Kolder did not respond to specific questions about the number of employees named in each of these documents, writing only that WLP used a "combination" of partners, employees, and contractors to run the mill.)
In the absence of those logs, a variety of government documents, medical records, and interviews conducted with eighteen mill workers reveal that at least twenty injuries—including at least five severe ones—have occurred at the sawmill since 2017. OSHA's severe-injury reporting requirements state that all employers under its jurisdiction must report amputations, eye losses, and work-related hospitalizations to the agency within 24 hours. Between January 2017 and July 2021, twelve Texas sawmills reported a total of eighteen severe injuries to OSHA, according to an analysis of agency data. Two of those reported injuries came from Custom Cut Lumber, representing 11 percent of the statewide total. That figure jumps to 24 percent when the three unreported injuries that occurred at the mill are folded in. This means that in the past five years, almost one in four known severe injuries at Texas sawmills has occurred at the single mill operated by Church of Wells members.
One metric OSHA uses to evaluate an employer's safety record is the incidence rate of nonfatal injuries and illnesses, which measures the number of recordable incidents per worker hour. In my reporting I confirmed two workplace injuries at the sawmill in 2017, six in 2018, four in 2019, and four in 2020. Assuming that in those years the mill had 22 full-time employees working fifty weeks a year—as TWC records indicate it did in 2018—those incident rates every year would exceed the industry average for injuries, and in 2018 would be nearly five times as large.("2018 was four years ago. The mill's operations have improved since then in many ways, including safety," Kolder wrote to Texas Monthly.) In 2021, the sawmill had 44 employees, according to TWC documents, and four injuries; the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics does not yet have data for 2021 on the incidence rate industry wide.
When asked about how the mill's injury rate compares with the industry average, Kolder responded that "CCL does not have data regarding the injury rate of the industry at large, but it firmly believes that its accident rate is below industry averages." He said it is "patently false" that there has been an unusual number of accidents at the mill, and that the mill "had many more than 44,000 worked hours in 2018," which would make our injury rate calculation "way off," but he declined to provide the number of worked hours at the mill. To get the rate below 6.1, the sawmill industry's average incidence rate for 2018, workers at the mill would have needed to have clocked nearly 200,000 hours for the year, or the equivalent of 99 people working 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year.
Two former OSHA officials reviewed a spreadsheet of the twenty injuries that I confirmed occurred at Custom Cut Lumber in the past five years and said that given the type of injuries and their frequency, the company seemed to lack an effective safety program. Kathleen Fagan, a physician who specializes in occupational medicine and spent ten years as a medical officer for OSHA in Washington, D.C., before retiring in 2019, told me that the injuries listed would be considered recordable by OSHA and noted that eight of them resulted from lack of proper lockout-tagout procedures. "So, for a small company, these are terrible statistics," she wrote. "This is a dangerous workplace with no apparent safety program or effort to evaluate their injuries and take steps to prevent future injuries."
When injuries occur, workers told me, victims are first usually triaged on-site by Mark de Rouville, a sawmill supervisor and church member who is a former Navy SEAL with training as a medic. When an injury is too serious for him to handle alone, de Rouville or another supervisor will drive workers to an urgent care center or emergency room for licensed medical treatment. One worker, Jyran Shaw, a former Alto High School track star, told me that a two-by-four jammed in a trim saw and flew into his forehead in September 2020, when he was 23, leaving him with a gash above his eyebrow and a concussion. He said de Rouville, who was not at the mill, tried to persuade him over FaceTime to let him staple his forehead closed. ("It'll just leave a more visible scar than stitches would,'" de Rouville said, according to Shaw. De Rouville did not respond to a request for comment.)
Kolder told Texas Monthly that "CCL cares for its workers; if there is ever an injury, it is very important to make sure first aid is administered, and also make sure they have a ride to medical facilities if needed." Some workers told me, though, that after their injuries they were pressured to return to work immediately. In the fall of 2018, Myles Robinson, then 25, said another worker bumped his arm into an unguarded moving part of the scragg mill, fracturing several bones in his right hand. He said his supervisor told him he would lose his job if he missed work. He returned the next day in a cast. He recounted in a January 2022 interview that, when he mentioned that he might pursue legal action against the mill, he was told by a supervisor that the injury was "God's wrath, so it wouldn't hold up in court."
Three severe injuries that were never reported to OSHA stand out. In 2018, an unguarded circular blade sliced through three fingers of a 29-year-old worker, John Michael Armstrong. His pinkie was cut down to the middle knuckle and he lost much of his index finger after two surgeries to try to save it. In July 2019, a man from San Augustine, a town about an hour east of Alto, nicked the tip of his right middle finger down to the bone on a saw. To treat the injury, a doctor had to slice off the end of his finger, meeting OSHA's definition of a "medical amputation."
And in the summer of 2018, eighteen-year-old Alto resident Raymond Poole was maimed as he tried to clear a jammed piece of wood from the conveyor belt of a machine that turns logs into pallet cants. No one stopped the machine so that Poole could tackle the jam safely, as OSHA regulations require. His left hand got caught and sucked under the belt. He fell back and shrieked from the pain, but he said no one could hear him over the roar of the machine so his injury escaped notice until he threw a rock at a coworker standing nearby. Once church members at the workstation realized he was injured, they fell to their knees and started praying, he said. "I said, 'I believe in Jesus and and s—, but you need to take me to the hospital," Poole recounted. A mill supervisor took him to a hospital in Jacksonville, some thirty minutes north, where he spent four nights and had surgery to place a rod and screws in his left wrist.
Poole had been working at the mill for a year at the time of the incident, having begun employment there as a seventeen-year-old who was paid under the table and performed work minors aren't allowed to do, such as operating saws. "In Alto, the mill is the only place you can make a quick buck," he told me in December 2021. ("My client does not recall Raymond's age when he started providing services for [Whirlwind Lumber Production]," Kolder wrote.)
Poole said that a few days after he left the hospital, Sanders shared with him that he too had broken his arm badly at the mill. "He said, 'I know what it feels like,'" Poole recounted. He upped Poole's pay $2 to $10.50 an hour and gave him light duty answering phones, sweeping the kitchen, and supervising other workers for the next two months.When Poole's uncles would suggest that he should sue over his injuries, Poole would reply that he was being treated well. But three years later, he regrets not filing a lawsuit within the statute of limitations. He has a broad scar on his wrist, he can't lift anything heavy with that hand, and his fingertips often go numb. His arm throbs when the weather changes. "They f—ed up my life. I got to live with this for the rest of my life," he told me.
When asked whether the mill reported these three severe injuries to OSHA, Kolder replied that the three men were independent contractors so the company was not required to record their injuries for OSHA. But these three sawmill workers with severe injuries were paid by the hour, were essential to the sawmill's operation, worked using the business's saws and other machinery, and were directed and supervised by mill management. "This seems clearly to be a case where the government needs to investigate whether these workers were misclassified as independent contractors," said Debbie Berkowitz, a former chief of staff at OSHA who is currently a fellow at Georgetown University's Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor. "The company clearly is in a very dangerous industry. In order to hide their true injury rates from the government it seems to me they have a great incentive to start labeling these workers as independent contractors. They do this so they can outsource their responsibility to provide safe conditions to employees." Berkowitz added, "From what I've found, the only reason to avoid scrutiny is because you have unsafe conditions you don't want to fix."
It wasn't until January of 2021 that Custom Cut Lumber managers first reported an injury to OSHA, according to agency records. The afternoon after a twenty-year-old Crockett man caught his right thumb in the pulley of a chop saw, fractured it, and was hospitalized overnight, a mill employee reported the incident to OSHA, admitting that the saw's belts and pulleys did not have guards, which are required.
Two months later, Sanders visited OSHA's website to report that a 24-year-old employee was hospitalized after a blade sliced into three fingers, triggering OSHA's first-ever inspection of the mill. According to a record obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request, a compliance safety and health officer from the agency spent thirty minutes at Custom Cut Lumber on the afternoon of March 23, 2021, and conducted a partial inspection, examining the five-head trim saw that mangled the worker's hand and any "plain view" hazards, in accordance with agency rules. Employees told him the saw jammed "multiple times a day," and the inspector found that it was not properly guarded, initially fining the mill $9,557, an amount later reduced to $5,734.20 after Sanders signed a settlement agreement with the agency. The mill later remedied the hazard by attaching a "caution" sign on a yellow chain warning employees not to walk past that point while the machine is running. (Kolder wrote that OSHA found only "one safety issue" in its inspection.)
R. Dean Wingo, a 38-year veteran of OSHA who last served as the assistant regional administrator for Region Six, which includes Texas, reviewed the report and noted that an inspector spending only thirty minutes at the business amounted to "a very cursory rev...
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