On-the-job Fatality Rates Soar for Latino Workers.
There's little excuse for inadequate training. But when there's danger of injury or death, there's NO excuse for NO training.
Today, Latinos are getting hurt on the job in appauling numbers. In almost all cases, lack of training is the reason. There's NO excuse for that. Not when there are products like TV Trainer. TV Trainer works because we train the way Latino's routinely acculturate (through television). And it's fast.
We can help your workers (and your business) avoid accidents. Call us. 952.221.1800
Craig Evans for TV Trainer.
______________________
On-the-job fatality rates soar for Latino workers.
September 9, 2006
By STEPHEN FRANKLIN and DARNELL LITTLE
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
CHICAGO -- Before the accident, he had warned the owner of the small dry cleaner that the pressing machine was old and dangerous. But his boss told him to forget about it, and Mario, fearful of losing his job, didn't say another word.
Then one day last winter, the massive, steaming press collapsed on Mario's left arm, melting the skin, mangling his fist and costing him a $5.70-an-hour job. There was no health insurance, no worker's compensation benefit and no severance pay offered, Mario said.
"If you don't have papers, you work 8 or 10 hours a day, six days a week, and you don't complain," said the muscular, middle-age illegal immigrant from Mexico.
Much of the furor over immigration reform has been about whether undocumented workers like Mario should be allowed to stay in the U.S. or made to leave. But beyond that debate lies an undeniable fact: They face disproportionate dangers on the job.
For most Americans, the workplace is much safer than it was a decade ago. This is not the case for many Latinos, who remain trapped in an earlier, more brutal era of industrialization. They lead throwaway lives, and their plight is nearly invisible because so many live in the shadows.
Over the last decade, Latino workers' fatality rates have soared, outstripping their share of the workforce. With more Latinos on the job, many suffer a hefty dose of injuries from some of the most dangerous jobs, according to government statistics and interviews with union, workplace safety and public health experts, as well as workers.
They are vulnerable because many are immigrants who are illiterate in English, have little understanding of American culture and are grateful for any job, no matter how dangerous. And because many are undocumented and afraid of being deported, they often don't ask questions and don't challenge the boss.
"They shouldn't be dying and they don't even have the same rights to complain. Being illegal, they fear retaliation. This is assuming that they know that what they are doing is dangerous," said Jordan Barab, a workplace safety advocate in Washington, D.C., and a former union health and safety expert.
Because they are not part of mainstream society, there is no clear picture of how many undocumented Latino immigrants are injured or killed on the job. Any statistical evidence is incomplete. But they are widely assumed to constitute the bulk of the nation's estimated 7.2 million unauthorized workers, and most experts say they have driven up the casualty count.
Those who know most and are willing to talk are the doctors who try to mend them, the compensation lawyers who try to get their medical bills paid, and the helter-skelter network of day laborer centers and others that strive to find them help and protection.
Lawyer John Budin, who regularly is consulted by injured workers, said it's common for bosses to refuse to pay medical bills or to warn undocumented employees against filing a worker's compensation complaint.
"I had a guy come in this week whose boss said, 'I'll call immigration and get you deported back to Mexico if you file,'" he said. The worker, he added, is worried and thinking it over.
A sampling of injury reports in federal files tells many of these kinds of stories of inexperienced and illegal workers being killed and injured.
In suburban Maryland in May 2004, a 15-year-old from Guatemala was sucked into landscape cleaning equipment and killed. Federal officials say the teenager had never been told how to use protective equipment or how to turn off the machine.
In South Carolina, 15- and 16-year-old brothers, illegal immigrants from Mexico, were killed minutes after they began working on a trench in 2003 when the walls caved in.
"We have investigated a number of cases where the victim was Spanish-speaking and the training was only in English, and there was little or minimal attempts to translate it into Spanish," said Dawn Castillo, an official with the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, the research arm for the nation's worker safety and health effort.
Jorge Mejia was doing day construction work in Chicago, hired off the street, when he nearly lost an eye in a fall. He said bosses rarely told him about the dangers of the job, and that day he recalls not wearing any protective equipment.
There were four of them, standing on a scaffold and trying to reach the building. But the crew was not close enough, so three workers leaned toward the fourth as he stretched toward the facade.
Just then the scaffold flipped over, and Mejia fell backward, tumbling three stories. At the hospital, he realized he could only see shadows with one eye.
His back also was badly hurt, and he can no longer lift the way he once did. Because of his health, he stopped working full time. He takes easier jobs two or three times a week, but his earnings are not the same. Despite his back pain and fear of going blind in his right eye, he plans to stay and keep sending money home to his family in Mexico.
"Here I can make $200, $300 in a few days. That's better than $40 a day in Mexico."
When these workers get hurt, they aren't the only ones to pay for their injuries.
Public-health facilities have to swallow the emergency room bills of injured undocumented immigrants not eligible for government support. And then the workers' families have to arrange their own therapies because they cannot receive such support.
And the toll grows.
While non-Latino workplace fatalities dropped 16 percent between 1992 and 2005, Latino workers' deaths jumped 72 percent in the same period. Last year, the fatality rate for Latinos was 4.9 per 100,000 workers, a rate unmatched by any other group. They accounted for more than 16 percent of all deaths though they make up 13 percent of the workforce.
Confusingly, government figures show Latinos' injuries declining in recent years, though hardly as much as they did for others.
But James Platner, head of research for the Washington-area Center to Protect Workers' Rights, a construction union-backed organization, seriously doubts that.
The reality, he and others suggest, is that there is a vast undercount of the injuries because Latino illegal immigrants stray far from public facilities and do not report being hurt.
In the case of Mario, the injured dry cleaner, the State Workers Compensation Commission recently ordered the employer to pay his $10,000 medical bill plus four months of disability pay. His lawyer has been trying to collect the money.
The owner of the dry-cleaning business could not be reached, while a daughter working there would say only that the accident was Mario's fault.
Meanwhile, Mario, who asked not to be further identified, is both scarred by the accident and devastated that he can't go back to the work he enjoyed.
"It changed my life," he said glumly in a relative's basement where he has been living. "I was happy before, cleaning, pressing clothes. Now I'm afraid of heat. Now, I can't do anything."
Today, Latinos are getting hurt on the job in appauling numbers. In almost all cases, lack of training is the reason. There's NO excuse for that. Not when there are products like TV Trainer. TV Trainer works because we train the way Latino's routinely acculturate (through television). And it's fast.
We can help your workers (and your business) avoid accidents. Call us. 952.221.1800
Craig Evans for TV Trainer.
______________________
On-the-job fatality rates soar for Latino workers.
September 9, 2006
By STEPHEN FRANKLIN and DARNELL LITTLE
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
CHICAGO -- Before the accident, he had warned the owner of the small dry cleaner that the pressing machine was old and dangerous. But his boss told him to forget about it, and Mario, fearful of losing his job, didn't say another word.
Then one day last winter, the massive, steaming press collapsed on Mario's left arm, melting the skin, mangling his fist and costing him a $5.70-an-hour job. There was no health insurance, no worker's compensation benefit and no severance pay offered, Mario said.
"If you don't have papers, you work 8 or 10 hours a day, six days a week, and you don't complain," said the muscular, middle-age illegal immigrant from Mexico.
Much of the furor over immigration reform has been about whether undocumented workers like Mario should be allowed to stay in the U.S. or made to leave. But beyond that debate lies an undeniable fact: They face disproportionate dangers on the job.
For most Americans, the workplace is much safer than it was a decade ago. This is not the case for many Latinos, who remain trapped in an earlier, more brutal era of industrialization. They lead throwaway lives, and their plight is nearly invisible because so many live in the shadows.
Over the last decade, Latino workers' fatality rates have soared, outstripping their share of the workforce. With more Latinos on the job, many suffer a hefty dose of injuries from some of the most dangerous jobs, according to government statistics and interviews with union, workplace safety and public health experts, as well as workers.
They are vulnerable because many are immigrants who are illiterate in English, have little understanding of American culture and are grateful for any job, no matter how dangerous. And because many are undocumented and afraid of being deported, they often don't ask questions and don't challenge the boss.
"They shouldn't be dying and they don't even have the same rights to complain. Being illegal, they fear retaliation. This is assuming that they know that what they are doing is dangerous," said Jordan Barab, a workplace safety advocate in Washington, D.C., and a former union health and safety expert.
Because they are not part of mainstream society, there is no clear picture of how many undocumented Latino immigrants are injured or killed on the job. Any statistical evidence is incomplete. But they are widely assumed to constitute the bulk of the nation's estimated 7.2 million unauthorized workers, and most experts say they have driven up the casualty count.
Those who know most and are willing to talk are the doctors who try to mend them, the compensation lawyers who try to get their medical bills paid, and the helter-skelter network of day laborer centers and others that strive to find them help and protection.
Lawyer John Budin, who regularly is consulted by injured workers, said it's common for bosses to refuse to pay medical bills or to warn undocumented employees against filing a worker's compensation complaint.
"I had a guy come in this week whose boss said, 'I'll call immigration and get you deported back to Mexico if you file,'" he said. The worker, he added, is worried and thinking it over.
A sampling of injury reports in federal files tells many of these kinds of stories of inexperienced and illegal workers being killed and injured.
In suburban Maryland in May 2004, a 15-year-old from Guatemala was sucked into landscape cleaning equipment and killed. Federal officials say the teenager had never been told how to use protective equipment or how to turn off the machine.
In South Carolina, 15- and 16-year-old brothers, illegal immigrants from Mexico, were killed minutes after they began working on a trench in 2003 when the walls caved in.
"We have investigated a number of cases where the victim was Spanish-speaking and the training was only in English, and there was little or minimal attempts to translate it into Spanish," said Dawn Castillo, an official with the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, the research arm for the nation's worker safety and health effort.
Jorge Mejia was doing day construction work in Chicago, hired off the street, when he nearly lost an eye in a fall. He said bosses rarely told him about the dangers of the job, and that day he recalls not wearing any protective equipment.
There were four of them, standing on a scaffold and trying to reach the building. But the crew was not close enough, so three workers leaned toward the fourth as he stretched toward the facade.
Just then the scaffold flipped over, and Mejia fell backward, tumbling three stories. At the hospital, he realized he could only see shadows with one eye.
His back also was badly hurt, and he can no longer lift the way he once did. Because of his health, he stopped working full time. He takes easier jobs two or three times a week, but his earnings are not the same. Despite his back pain and fear of going blind in his right eye, he plans to stay and keep sending money home to his family in Mexico.
"Here I can make $200, $300 in a few days. That's better than $40 a day in Mexico."
When these workers get hurt, they aren't the only ones to pay for their injuries.
Public-health facilities have to swallow the emergency room bills of injured undocumented immigrants not eligible for government support. And then the workers' families have to arrange their own therapies because they cannot receive such support.
And the toll grows.
While non-Latino workplace fatalities dropped 16 percent between 1992 and 2005, Latino workers' deaths jumped 72 percent in the same period. Last year, the fatality rate for Latinos was 4.9 per 100,000 workers, a rate unmatched by any other group. They accounted for more than 16 percent of all deaths though they make up 13 percent of the workforce.
Confusingly, government figures show Latinos' injuries declining in recent years, though hardly as much as they did for others.
But James Platner, head of research for the Washington-area Center to Protect Workers' Rights, a construction union-backed organization, seriously doubts that.
The reality, he and others suggest, is that there is a vast undercount of the injuries because Latino illegal immigrants stray far from public facilities and do not report being hurt.
In the case of Mario, the injured dry cleaner, the State Workers Compensation Commission recently ordered the employer to pay his $10,000 medical bill plus four months of disability pay. His lawyer has been trying to collect the money.
The owner of the dry-cleaning business could not be reached, while a daughter working there would say only that the accident was Mario's fault.
Meanwhile, Mario, who asked not to be further identified, is both scarred by the accident and devastated that he can't go back to the work he enjoyed.
"It changed my life," he said glumly in a relative's basement where he has been living. "I was happy before, cleaning, pressing clothes. Now I'm afraid of heat. Now, I can't do anything."
posted by Craig Evans at 7:34 AM
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