Throwaway Workers: The Immigrant Experience

[Omaha Steve]

http://spewingforth.blogspot.com/2006/09/throwaway-workers-immigrant-experience.html

Throwaway Workers: The Immigrant Experience

The raging debate over this country's immigration policy tends to focus on how high we build the walls, and whether or when those who have been working here for years will be given the opportunity to become citizens. Lost in the debate is the issue of the work that the immigrants are doing, and how many get injured or killed.

Instead of talking about the fate of unions and trends in wages, Chicago Tribune writers Steve Franklin and Darnell Little are marking Labor Day 2006 by writing about actual workers -- telling the stories of "throwaway workers," Latinos who labor and die in the country's most dangerous jobs.

Before the accident, he had warned the owner of the small Diversey Avenue 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 eight 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.

They note the disproportionately high injury and death rate of immigrant workers:

While non-Latino workplace fatalities dropped 16 percent between 1992 and 2005, Latino workers' deaths jumped 72 percent during the same time. 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 only 13 percent of the workforce.

Of all the workplace deaths investigated by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration in the Chicago area in the last three years, half involved immigrants. Federal officials say nearly all of them were Latino.

FULL story at link above.

[knowbody0]

1. shame shame shame

disposable humans.

[Cant_wait_for_2008]

2. Farming accidents are quite common where I live. One Mexican man died..

a few years ago because the rich, White agri-business owner ordered him to clean the waste out of a corn harvester while the machine was still running.

The 25 year old Mexican man, with a wife a two children left behind, was pulled into the machine and died when his shirt sleeve got caught while cleaning the machine, which should have been shut down, per manufacturers instructions.

Needless to say, the "farmer" never spent a day in jail, even after a lengthy trial in his own home county (the good old boy network), for essentially ordering this man to do something that he knew could be deadly.