Immigrant Worker Safety and Health
In the United States, immigrant workers constitute a significant proportion of the workforce. In 2006, 15% of U.S. workers were foreign-born and at least 6.3 million were undocumented. Immigrant workers face a disproportionate risk for workplace injury and illness. This is due to a confluence of factors including an overrepresentation in the most hazardous industries including construction and agriculture. Additionally, workplace safety interventions often do not reach immigrant worker populations due to barriers created by social, cultural, and economic issues including language, literacy, and marginal economic status. Furthermore, immigrant workers often lack knowledge of their rights to workplace safety and are reluctant to pursue these rights.
All workers have an equal right to a safe and healthy workplace irrespective of their immigration status. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has initiated several targeted intramural and extramural programs aimed at identifying and eliminating safety and health hazards experienced by immigrant workers. Some examples include:
- The NIOSH Fatality Assessment and Control Evaluation (FACE) program identifies and studies work-related injury deaths, with the goal of identifying effective prevention measures. Through on-site investigations, NIOSH and cooperating states collect detailed circumstances for select incident types, including deaths of Hispanic workers since 2002.
- Targeted research programs focused on the construction and agricultural sectors, both of which employ a disproportionate share of immigrant workers.
- An occupational health disparities program, which is conducting research on the causes and prevention of occupational health disparities including those experienced by immigrant workers.
- A Spanish language website and translation of several NIOSH publications into Spanish.
- A National Academy of Science workshop requested by NIOSH on steps to improve Spanish language occupational safety and health materials. The report of the workshop Safety is Seguridad: A Workshop Summary can be found at: www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10641.
- An innovative information and communication effort with the Spanish-language television network Telemundo and other partners, in which construction safety messages were incorporated dramatically into a widely watched prime-time series, and supplemented with a public service announcement and a special website.
In addition to the projects mentioned above, NIOSH has funded a number of research grants targeting immigrant workers. The most comprehensive grant program has been the Environmental Justice & Community-Based Participatory Research. This program is funded collaboratively with the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). The purpose of the program has been to enable workers and community residents to more actively participate in the full spectrum of research. To achieve this goal, the program was designed to bring together three partners: a community organization, an environmental health researcher and a health care professional to develop models and approaches to building communication, trust, and capacity with the final goal of increasing community participation in the research process. Through this program, NIOSH has funded 10 projects which target a wide range of immigrant worker communities across the country. Summaries of the NIOSH and NIEHS Environmental Justice projects can be found at: http://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/supported/programs/justice/grantees/index.cfm
At the Safety, Health and Social Justice for Immigrant Workers - Lessons from the NIOSH Environmental Justice Projects session of the 2008 American Public Health Association's annual conference Public Health Without Borders (October 25-29), a panel will present the experiences from six of the environmental justice projects addressing safety and health concerns of immigrants working in farming, poultry processing, and restaurant and domestic work. Each presenter will provide insights about how notions of social justice are achieved through their work.
Through this session we hope to identify five major challenges to developing intervention studies targeting immigrant workers; discuss methods that can be used to promote improved social justice as part of safety and health intervention programs targeting immigrant workers; and define major strategies and obstacles to implementing successful community based interventions for occupational safety and health.
For those unable to attend the session, we would appreciate feedback through this blog. Specifically, what experience have others had with developing successful interventions for immigrant workers? Additionally, what types of materials are needed to better assist safety and health professional to provide information and training to foreign-born workers?
—Sherry Baron, MD, MPH
Dr. Baron is the Coordinator for Occupational Health Disparities at NIOSH
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Comments
Dr. Baron: I've not applied my research to immigrant workers, but I suspect I'd find the same gap as with whole of general industry. Premise is, "we don't know safety." Sounds silly to say that, but my research supports that. We all have differing mental models of what safety is, our roles in it and how to manage it. Immigrants will have their mental models of safety, and these can be surfaced, tested and changed. One of my clients had the epiphany, "How can we manage something we cannot define?"
If every single worker/manager had the same mental model of safety, a like-minded vision, we essentially have that many minds, eyes, hands, working toward a common goal of seeking an acceptable level of control over risks and hazards in whatever we are doing. It only takes asking a few questions to start the change. I have a paper (editorial) on my hypothesis. Will send it if interested. Sent it earlier this year to some contacts at CDC.
Posted 10/27/08 at 11:00 am
I am working in a workers compensation clinic. Many things I want to say:
Posted 10/27/08 at 7:45 pm
I provide health care for many undocumented individuals. These individuals are working in construction, the food industry and a few are drivers. There is little or no information available about work dangers and minimal concern about chronic illness such as diabetes, HTN or hepatitis. Like doctors, they use denial to deal with serious illnesses. Even when we give them medicines to take home, most of them do not continue the medicines, do not take advantage of the free city hospitals to obtain medical care (you have to miss a day's work to go to the free clinic) the good thing is that most of my hispanic patients do not smoke.
Sadly they will only take a disease seriously, if I say it can kill them. So I advise my fellow physicians to use this card wisely during the care of their hispanic population...example..don't drink, it will mess up your liver and kill you! The best thing is that the patients have been teaching us spanish, so my co-worker and I can do the rudimentry history by ourselves!
Posted 11/3/08 at 3:57 pm
The situation you're addressing is not unlike food production systems on a global scale. Developed world (e.g. U.S.) pressure on developing countries to provide any product in any season at as low a cost as possible can generate investments in staying competitive versus protecting workers. Laborers in developing countries may be readily available, at low cost, and encounter low levels of concern when repercussions, e.g. harmful incidents, occur.
I produced a video on this:
http://www.localactionglobalhealth.org/KeyChallenges/Infrastructure/tabid/72/Default.aspx
Our recent work with Cargill, among others, gives me hope that this is being recognized. Cargill and McDonald's, for example, are working with non-profits in Brazil and in Europe to enhance the environmental and labor-related conditions inherent in their production and sourcing systems. My take-away is the need for greater consciousness on the part of industry partners... Sometimes that takes "sousveillance" (monitoring from grass-roots levels) and the waving of red flags by non-profits and others to inspire partnerships that can lead to improvements.
Posted 11/12/08 at 9:56 am