Latinos Dying on the Job

On the whole, American work has become significantly safer since the establishment of OSHA in 1970. There are two basic reasons for this. First, OSHA made American work safer. Second, and probably more important, most dangerous labor in the United States has either been mechanized or outsourced. This has the advantage of saving American workers’ lives. It has the disadvantage of both undermining the economic stability of the American working class and exposing people of the world’s poorer nations to working conditions that are no longer legal in the United States and should not be legal for any corporation seeking to do business in the United States.

What this means as far as workplace death numbers is that they have continued to decline with one important exception–among Latinos. Recent growing death rates among Latinos have two root causes. The first is an OSHA enforcement arm weakened by decades of corporate capture and legislative underfunding. The work that is still in the U.S. is not properly monitored. The second reason is that the remaining dangerous work in the U.S.–agriculture, natural resource extraction, and construction especially–is both hard to mechanize and heavily Latino-based.

At the same time, however, Latinos are increasingly overrepresented in the dangerous industries that remain, according to a 2013 analysis by the BLS. Take construction, which has added 636,000 jobs since the industry’s post-recession low point in January 2011. It also accounted for the largest number of fatalities in 2013, 18 percent. Latinos make up 15.6 percent of the population over 16 years old, but their representation in construction is high and growing: Nearly one in three workers in construction and natural resource extraction occupations were Latino in 2013, up from 23.7 percent in 2003.

Immigrants are especially vulnerable if they can’t read safety instructions or communicate with supervisors. OSHA has ramped up its outreach to Spanish-speakers in recent years, visiting worker centers all over the country to conduct trainings.

Sometimes, though, it’s harder to reach the smaller employers. And the number of deaths of people working for contractors has jumped just since OSHA started measuring them in 2011, from 542 in 2011 to 734 in 2013. Hispanics are overrepresented there, too, making up 28.3 percent of contractor deaths in 2013 (compared to 18 percent of total deaths).

“A lot of these smaller companies are just trying to get the job done quickly and cost-effectively, and a lot of times the worker safety is sacrificed in all of that,” says Andrew Hass, a lawyer with D.C.’s Employment Justice Center who represents many immigrant workers.

Nearly every workplace death is an avoidable death. If there are fewer industrial jobs in the U.S., that should mean more ability for OSHA to monitor the nation’s remaining dangerous worksites. But that is not the case.