The Importance of Recognizing and Preventing Workplace Injuries for Hispanic Workers

Nick Avgerinos — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 10:03:00 GMT

Recently, “Breaking Down Borders: Speaking Up For Those without a Voice” discusses the challenges immigrant workers face in accessing all of their legal rights if they are injured on the job. Unfortunately, a lack of rightful remedies is not the only challenge facing immigrant workers, especially of Hispanic origin. Hispanic workers face a disproportionately high mortality rate and more frequent injuries from accidents on the job.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention reports data to support that the fatality rate for Hispanic employees was 5.0 per 100,000 workers, while the rate for all workers was 4.0 between 1996 and 2006. According to Sherry Baron of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, “Foreign-born Hispanic workers had a 70 percent higher rate of work-related injury death compared to native-born Hispanic workers.”

These startling statistics present the question of why Hispanic workers, particularly those who are foreign-born are more frequently victims of unsafe working conditions. Dr. John Howard, director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health ( NIOSH ), and OSHA Administrator Edwin Foulke Jr. addressed a meeting of the American Society of Safety Engineers’ ( ASSE ) Safety Professionals and the Latino Workforce (SPALW) group on June 10 in Las Vegas on the growing number of Hispanic worker injuries. Members of these groups proposed several reasons for the flux of injuries, including difficulties in communication because of language and misinterpretation of directions and intent.

In order to improve the deficit of more frequent injuries to Hispanic workers, employers need to take into account special necessities of the non-English speaking workers. Employers should provide handbooks and other safety guidelines in multiple languages, and supervisors who speak different languages to make sure the workers understand any dangerous activities in which they are participating.

These workers are entitled to understand how to be safe in the workplace. They are entitled to know how to avoid on-the-job injuries. Employers stand to benefit by providing a safe workplace; fostering a positive work environment keeps people on the job, avoiding injury, and thereby promoting productivity. After all, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Nick Avgerinos

Breaking Down Borders: Speaking Up For Those without a Voice

Nick Avgerinos — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 11:10:00 GMT

If a tree falls in the forest but no one hears it, does it still make a sound? You bet it does. Similarly, just because an injured party cannot speak for himself does not mean that he does not have something to say. Entiendes?

For the millions of immigrant workers in this country, this is precisely the problem they face every day. Hay muchos problemas, from the language barrier to lack of knowledge regarding one’s rights. The AFL-CIO does an impressive job of delineating such rights in an accessible way. In fact, it goes so far as to provide the same information regarding workers’ rights in Chinese, Spanish, and Vietnamese, thereby lowering the barrier of access to information. This sort of access, however, assumes that immigrant workers have the knowledge, time, and ability to use it. Unfortunately, this is rarely true.

The wages of immigrant workers are often much below the minimum wage. Perhaps an idealistic few might wonder how this is possible. Well, the meager sums paid by their employers still exceed the amount they could earn in their native countries. For many immigrant workers, one hour of the California minimum wage is more money an entire day of wages in Mexico.Simply put, it’s better than nothing…and their employers know it. Oftentimes, then, their safety and well-being is sacrificed in favor of the almighty dollar. In a world where quality is often sacrificed for quantity, safety training is too often supplanted by a learn-as-you-go mentality.

More complicated problems arise when the immigrants being abused in the workplace are here illegally. Starving transcends the language barrier. So does the agony of losing one’s limb. Yet, beyond the pangs of such suffering, the injured usually remain silent. Why? Because they don’t have rights; at least that is what they’re made to believe. As attorney Pat Jennings reported in January, though, the South Carolina Supreme Court recently ruled that citizenship status should not affect a worker’s ability to recover for workers’ compensation claims.

Yet, for most immigrant workers, speaking up means getting pushed further down. It means possible lower wages, even longer hours, or being forced to leave the country.

Such fear is alive in the community of Postville, where the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided the AgriProcessors meatpacking plant on May 12, putting nearly half of the plant’s workforce out of commission. What this may mean for us: higher kosher meat prices. What this means for them: putting their entire lives on pause.

As those AgriProcessors employees who escaped detainment huddle in the local Catholic Church, praying for the chance to return to their lives, praying for the chance to be underpaid and overworked, we have stop and wonder why. Some of us might remember the old Schoolhouse Rock theme song, espousing that “Knowledge is Power.” It’s clear that many immigrants today lack any knowledge regarding their rights, while being acutely aware of their own powerlessness. Providing information, like that advanced by the AFL-CIO, is a step toward increasing knowledge and thereby distributing the extreme imbalance of power often present in the workplace.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Nick Avgerinos

Rockford & Moline Personal Injury Lawyers - Discrimination

The Importance of Recognizing and Preventing Workplace Injuries for Hispanic Workers

Breaking Down Borders: Speaking Up For Those without a Voice