The New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH) issued a report on Monday, ” The Price of Life: 2015 Report on Construction Fatalities in NYC.” A passage in the report addressed the burden on Hispanic and immigrant workers:

Latino and immigrant workers deal with disproportionate deadly risks in construction.

Latinos make up 25 percent of NYS construction workers, but represented 38 percent of construction fatalities in New York in 2012. Nationally, Latino construction fatalities increased from 182 in 2010 to 233 in 2013.

A study of the medical records of 7,000 U.S. Latino construction workers found that they were 30 percent more likely than white non-Latino workers to be injured on the job. Several studies have shown that lack of training is one reason for the higher injury rates of Latino construction workers.

In addition, many New York construction workers are non-citizens, according to the U.S. Census’s American Community Survey, including 40 percent of New York’s 124,240 construction laborers, 36 percent of the 7,710 drywall installers, 28 percent of the 10,405 roofers and 25 percent of the 88,475 carpenters. They, too, are less likely to receive safety training.

People of color and immigrant construction workers are more likely to work off the books, to be misclassified as independent contractors, to work as day laborers, or to have limited English proficiency that does not often include technical terms, and therefore are less likely to receive safety training.

Eighty percent of immigrant workers in construction are Latino. A Center for Popular Democracy report finding showed that 60% of New York construction fall fatalities OSHA investigated from 2003 to 2011 were Latino and or immigrant. In addition, non-unionized contractors are less likely to provide safe work conditions, OSHA training and safety equipment.

Undocumented workers are less likely to refuse to work in hazardous conditions or speak up for better health and safety conditions for fear they will be fired or deported. In-depth information on all cases is difficult to come by, as many fatalities are announced prior to names being released, and there are no follow-up media reports.

 

 

 

“Feeding New York” is a report issued on June 24 by Brandworkers, a membership organization of workers in the local food production industry in New York City. The report focuses on the New York City food manufacturing industry. Researchers surveyed and interviewed workers and drew upon other government survey data.
With some $5 billion in gross annual sales, New York City’s food manufacturing industry employs 14,000 workers. With 900 employers, the average workforce is 16. According to a 2007 study by the Fiscal Policy Institute, 70% of workers in the sector are immigrants, 72% are people of color, and 64% have less than a high school diploma.
Latinos make up 32%; Asians 20%, African Americans 17% and whites 27% of all food manufacturing workers.13 Among frontline workers, Latinos account for 53% of workers, Asians 16%, African Americans 16% and whites 12%.14 Women comprise 38% of the industry’s workers and are a growing segment of the industry.15 According to Census data, frontline workers make on average $12.06 per hour and work an average of 37.4 hours per week.
What the study’s survey found:
Work Safety lapses: 42% have suffered an injury at work. This includes: 15.1% have slipped/fallen; 14.2% have been cut; 11.3% have headaches; 10.4% have a back injury; 7.5% have been hit by equipment; 43.5% reported injury but did not get free
medical care from employer; 9.7% have come into contact with toxic chemicals; 4.9% aren’t sure; More than 1 in 10 report that their employer required them to do something that put their safety at risk
Little training: 44.1% did not receive any [job] training; 72.1% did not receive any training from employer; 56.7% never received training on workplace health and safety.
Limited health insurance: 52.9% don’t have health insurance; 4.7% get their health insurance through their employer; 54.9% have gone to work sick in the past year;
30.7% don’t get any paid sick days; 25.7% aren’t sure if they do or not.
Wages: Survey respondents on average earned $10.48 an hour. On average, undocumented workers made $2 less per hour than workers with legal status.

UL Workplace Safety and Health, a company that provides safety training and other human resource tools to employers, posted in late 2013 about the importance of safety training in the native language of the worker.
Teri Hale, who is Operations Manager of Professional Learning Services, wrote the following (this is an excerpt):
Misinterpretation can lead to lower productivity, lost revenue and more seriously, injury and loss of life. This is especially true in high-risk sectors such as manufacturing, oil and gas exploration, and construction. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) estimates that language barriers are a contributing factor in 25 percent of job-related accidents. Moreover, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that fatal injury rates were 69 percent higher for foreign-born Hispanic workers than for native-born Hispanic workers (who tend to have a better grasp of English).
In 2010, OSHA announced an initiative in which it directed compliance officers to observe whether employers provide employees safety training in a language they understand. Employers who fail to properly train their employees are subject to citations and penalties.

This blog published by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health is worth visiting.

Justice for Los Angeles carwash workers – this campaign has its own website here.
The campaign, part of CLEAN, confronts these labor problems of carewashers:
Carwashes routinely violate basic employment laws like those requiring workers be permitted to take rest breaks or have access to shade and clean drinking water.
* Workers frequently work 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, often with no overtime pay.
* Workers are often paid less than the legal minimum wage, sometimes earning as little as $30-$40 per day ($3-$4/ hour) or working for tips alone.
* Carwash workers are subject to health and safety hazards such as constant exposure to water and to dangerous chemicals without protective gear.
* Workers in the industry have reported kidney damage, respiratory problems and nerve damage due to their exposure to these hazards.

A large number of farm workers in American are immigrants. (The Agjobs program, part of the discarded immigration reform effort of 2007, was to address immigrant farm workers mainly in California.) I have read that over half of farm workers in California are illegal immigrants. An editorial in the New York Times addresses the gap in labor protections for these workers – a gap which has been there since the 1930s, when federal labor protections were created. In my field of workers compensation, many states still do not have their workers comp systems cover farm workers.
The editorial:
Farm Workers’ Rights, 70 Years Overdue
Published: April 5, 2009
It is more than bank failures and rising unemployment that give these troubled times echoes of the 1930s. An unfinished labor battle from the New Deal is being waged again.
The goal is to win basic rights that farm and domestic workers were denied more than 70 years ago, when the Roosevelt administration won major reforms protecting other workers in areas like overtime and disability pay, days of rest and union organizing.
That inequality is a perverse holdover from the Jim Crow era. Segregationist Southern Democrats in Congress could not abide giving African-Americans, who then made up most of the farm and domestic labor force, an equal footing in the workplace with whites. President Roosevelt’s compromise simply wrote workers in those industries out of the New Deal.

Continue reading Farm worker rights: time to set right?

A study published this summer in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine reported on interviews of day laborers in Seattle. The authors estimated that the annual rate of work injuries was 31%,or 31 per 100 workers an extraordinarily high rate comparable to roughly 10% for relatively high risk conventional employment such as construction.
The abstract of the article:
Occupational health and safety experience of day laborers in Seattle, WA
Noah S. Seixas, PhD, CIH *, Hillary Blecker, MPH, Janice Camp, MS, MN, Rick Neitzel, MS
Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington
email: Noah S. Seixas (nseixas@u.washington.edu)
American Journal of Industrial Medicine, 51:399-406, 2008
*Correspondence to Noah S. Seixas, Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, University of Washington, 4225 Roosevelt Way, NE, Seattle, WA 98105-6099.
Background: Day Labor is a growing part of the informal economy in the US, and in Seattle, and may entail a high risk of injury and illness at work.
Methods: We surveyed 180-day laborers, at two worker centers and an unregulated Street location concerning their job-specific exposures and injury experience.
Results: Exposures to both health and safety hazards were common at all three sites. After controlling for type of work, immigrant workers were 1.5-2 times more likely than non-immigrant day laborers to report exposure to hazardous conditions. Among the 180 participants 34 reported injuries were classified as recordable. We estimated an injury rate of 31 recordable injuries per 100 full time employees. The three hiring locations had differing job experiences and exposures. Those hired through worker centers had a lower risk of exposures, while the Street workers were more likely to refuse hazardous work.
Conclusions: Day laborers are exposed to numerous hazards at work, resulting in high injury rates. Multiple approaches including community based organizations which may provide some employment stability and social support for protection at work are needed to reduce occupational injury and illness risk among these vulnerable populations. Am. J. Ind. Med. 51:399-406, 2008. © 2008 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

The federal government funds community health centers. These health centers are charged with providing occupation health services to migratory and seasonal agricultural workers, but in practices this mandate is extended to include immigrant and other uninsured, poor urban workers. Thus community health centers can be an important source of medical care work immigrant workers throughout the United States.
I once visited such a center in Boston. A drawback of this, and other centers, is that they do not bill workers compensation insurers for work injury treatment, thus closing as loop iof accountability for these injuries.
I have included below a definition of a Federally qualified health centers, and the actual language from federal legal that mandates their use for occupational health.
FQHCs must provide primary care services for all age groups. FQHCs must provide preventive health services on site or by arrangement with another provider. Other requirements that must be provided directly by an FQHC or by arrangement with another provider include: dental services, mental health and substance abuse services, transportation services necessary for adequate patient care, hospital and specialty care.
Go here for a Frequently Asked Questions page on these centers.
TITLE 42 CHAPTER 6A SUBCHAPTER II Part D subpart i § 254b
§ 254b. Health centers
(D) in the case of health centers receiving grants under subsection (g) of this section, special occupation-related health services for migratory and seasonal agricultural workers, including—
(i) screening for and control of infectious diseases, including parasitic diseases; and
(ii) injury prevention programs, including prevention of exposure to unsafe levels of agricultural chemicals including pesticides

The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report from the Centers for Disease control for June 6, 2008, reported that Hispanic workers experience higher death work-related rates than other workers. The MMWR wrote:
Work-related injury deaths among Hispanic workers during 1992–2006 totaled 11,303 (Figure 1), approximately 13% of all U.S. work-related injury deaths during that period. Median age of Hispanic decedents was 35 years, compared with a median age of 42 years for all workers. Approximately 95% of Hispanic decedents were male. The annual work-related injury death rate for Hispanic workers exceeded the rate for all U.S. workers every year during 1992–2006, with the exception of 1995. In 2006, the work-related injury death rate for Hispanic workers was 5.0 per 100,000 Hispanic workers, compared with rates of 4.0 for all workers, 4.0 for non-Hispanic white workers, and 3.7 for non-Hispanic black workers. During 2003–2006, the work-related injury death rate for foreign-born Hispanic workers was 5.9, compared with a rate of 3.5 for U.S.-born Hispanic workers.
Why?
On March 16, 2005, I posted a column answering this question with respect to construction-related deaths, and repost it here:
10 Threads of Huerta’s Shroud
Why are Hispanic workers dying on the job at a rate much higher than other workers? On average, every calendar day marks another Hispanic work-related death that confirms this pattern. There are, it turns out, a crowd of culprits.
In 2002, an 18-year-old construction worker, Carlos Huerta, was building low income housing in North Carolina, when he fell to his death from a platform atop the raised prongs of a forklift. The circumstances of Huerta’s death reveal what is killing these workers at a higher rate.
One, there are more and more Hispanic workers here. Who are these men? A study published in 2004 in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine reported that most Hispanic construction workers were born outside the United States; one-third have been here for less than three years, and one-third speak Spanish only. They are 10 times more likely to have left school before the 9th grade. Two, Hispanic workers have been switching from agricultural to construction work for higher pay and to avoid having to travel to the harvests. Some bring to construction an independent mindset. That might work when it comes to working on the farm. But it’s not so desirable when it comes to construction.
Three, Hispanic construction workers are younger, hence less work-experienced. The disparity in construction death rates between Hispanics and non-Hispanics is at its highest in these green years-about double. The disparity declines with age but never disappears.

Continue reading High death rate among Hispanic workers