One Mexican Worker Dying a Day, AP Finds
Mar 13, 7:13 PM (ET)
By JUSTIN PRITCHARD
The jobs that lure Mexican workers to the United States are killing them in a
worsening epidemic that is now claiming a victim a day, an Associated Press
investigation has found. Though Mexicans often take the most hazardous jobs,
they are more likely than others to be killed even when doing similarly risky
work.
The death rates are greatest in several Southern and Western states, where a
Mexican worker is four times more likely to die than the average U.S.-born
worker. These accidental deaths are almost always preventable and often
gruesome: Workers are impaled, shredded in machinery, buried alive. Some are 15
years old.
For the first such study of Mexican worker deaths in the United States, The AP
talked with scores of workers, employers and government officials and analyzed
years of federal safety and population statistics.
Among the findings:
- Mexican death rates are rising even as the U.S. workplace grows safer
overall. In the mid-1990s, Mexicans were about 30 percent more likely to die
than native-born workers; now they are about 80 percent more likely.
- Deaths among Mexicans in the United States increased faster than their
population. As the number of Mexican workers grew by about half, from 4 million
to 6 million, the number of deaths rose by about two-thirds, from 241 to 387.
Deaths peaked at 420 in 2001.
- Though their odds of dying in the Southeast and parts of the West are far
greater than the U.S. average, fatalities occur everywhere: Mexicans died
cutting North Carolina tobacco and Nebraska beef, felling trees in Colorado and
welding a balcony in Florida, trimming grass at a Las Vegas golf course and
falling from scaffolding in Georgia.
- Even compared to other immigrants, what's happening to Mexicans is
exceptional in scope and scale. Mexicans are nearly twice as likely as the rest
of the immigrant population to die at work.
Why is all this happening?
Public safety officials and workers themselves say the answer comes down to
this: Mexicans are hired to work cheap, the fewer questions the better.
They may be thrown into jobs without training or safety equipment. Their
objections may be silent if they speak no English or are here illegally. And
their work culture and Third World safety expectations don't discourage risk-
taking.
Federal and state safety agencies have started to recognize the problem. But
they have limited resources - only a few Spanish-speaking investigators work in
regions with hundreds of thousands of recent arrivals - and often can't reach
the most vulnerable Mexican workers.
President Bush's recent proposal to grant illegal immigrants temporary legal
protections energized the national immigration debate. Yet in these
discussions, job safety has been an afterthought. Meanwhile, Mexicans continue
to die on the job.
---
Eighteen-year-old Carlos Huerta fell to his death as he built federal low-
income housing in North Carolina.
His bosses ignored basic work safety rules, according to state inspectors, when
they put him in a trash container that wasn't secured to the raised prongs of a
forklift. It soon toppled.
In 2002, the year Huerta was killed, more Mexicans died in construction than
any other industry - and more died from fatal falls than any other accident.
A year ago in South Carolina, brothers Rigouerto and Moses Xaca Sandoval died
building a suburban high school that, at 15 and 16, they might have attended.
They were buried in a trench when the walls of sandy soil collapsed.
The United States offered these three teens wages 10 times higher than in
Mexico. They offered their employers cheap, pliant labor. For safety violations
that led to these deaths, the federal Occupational Safety and Health
Administration has fined employers $50,475.
Accidents like these suggest that employers assign Mexicans to the most
glaringly perilous tasks, says Susan Feldmann, who fields calls from Spanish-
speaking workers for an institute within the federal Centers for Disease
Control.
"They're considered disposable," she says.
But employers are not always at fault, some safety officials say.
Though he was trained and wearing required safety gear, Jesus Soto Carbajal
severed his jugular vein with a carving knife in a Nebraska meatpacking plant.
The blade punctured his chest just above the protective metal mesh.
Federal safety officials didn't fine the employer, though they did recommend
fundamental changes in the work routine. A plant spokesman says that since the
accident in 2000, workers wear larger protective tunics.
Mexican worker deaths were also concentrated in agriculture.
When Urbano Ramirez suffered a nose bleed picking North Carolina tobacco, his
supervisor prescribed shade rest. Ramirez's body was found 10 days later. A
medical examiner said he died of unknown natural causes, the body too
decomposed for a definitive finding. His brother suspects heat stroke.
Like Ramirez, many deceased workers came with little more than a grade-school
education - and often left behind large families.
Criminal charges are rare, fines more typical. One exception is a California
dairyman who faces involuntary manslaughter charges after two of his workers
drowned in liquid cow manure.
Jose Alatorre was overcome by fumes from the fetid stew as he tried to fix a
pump at the bottom of a 30-foot concrete shaft. His partner died trying to save
him.
Both men were full-time workers but, according to prosecutors, were given no
safety training and no safety equipment to deal with the predictably hazardous
air.
The deaths received a burst of attention in early 2001, but 18 months later in
the same small town, a third Mexican-born worker died in the same way at
another dairy.
---
The AP's investigation focused on 1996 through 2002, the most recent set of
worker death data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Those were years
when the economic boom coaxed about 1 million Mexicans beyond the border
states, according to government estimates.
During those years, the analysis showed, Mexicans were increasingly more likely
to die on the job than U.S. workers of any race.
The annual death rate for Mexicans increased to the point that about 1 in
16,000 workers died. Meanwhile, for the average U.S.-born worker, the rate
steadily decreased to about 1 in 28,000.
Mexicans now represent about 1 in 24 workers in the United States, but about 1
in 14 workplace deaths.
Workplace fatalities had distinct regional patterns:
CALIFORNIA AND TEXAS: These states, where generations of Mexicans have
developed strong support networks, still rank atop the annual number of Mexican
worker deaths - but their numbers have steadied or fallen recently. Though low
relative to other states, the death rate for Mexican workers in California is
still greater than the average for U.S.-born workers.
SOUTH: In the bloc of states from Louisiana to Maryland, the Mexican death rate
averaged about 1 in 6,200 workers - four times that of native-born workers.
Total deaths more than tripled from 27 in 1996 to 94 in 2002 in the South
(excluding Texas), where some states saw Mexican populations triple to more
than 100,000 workers.
WEST: Outside California, deaths in Western states increased from 41 to 58, and
death rates hovered above the national average. Colorado and Washington stood
out with consistently high rates.
MIDWEST: The number of Mexicans killed annually doubled between 1996 and 2002,
from 19 to 38; death rates were slightly above the national average for
Mexicans.
NORTHEAST: The region has the fewest Mexicans, but death rates still far
exceeded American worker averages. Total annual deaths rose from eight to 17.
Construction was the deadliest industry. Across the nation, about 1 in 3,100
Mexican construction laborers died at work, a rate notably greater than native-
born white and black construction laborers, though in line with the rate for
native-born Hispanics.
---
Federal and state safety officials are starting to grapple with the problem.
OSHA Director John Henshaw points to Spanish-language materials the agency has
put on its Web site, as well as the agency's Hispanic Taskforce, which
coordinates outreach.
The greatest frustration is that so many deaths are avoidable.
"Ninety-five to 99 percent of the time, there's going to be noncompliance with
a standard that could have prevented the fatality," says Joe Reina, the No. 2
OSHA official for Texas and neighboring states and a leader of the Hispanic
Taskforce.
Still, Reina holds workers partly responsible.
"They just don't know that they have rights and responsibilities," Reina says,
including the ability to complain against employers.
Explaining those rights is one thing, enforcing them another. Some of OSHA's
own officials say their resources are insufficient and note the agency's own
policies generally provide for punitive action only after an accident. It's
unclear what Bush's guest worker program, if approved, would do for worker
safety.
As OSHA works to improve safety, language remains a barrier. By the agency's
own count, there are no Spanish-speaking inspectors or accident investigators
in the half of Georgia that includes immigrant-rich Atlanta. Some other
Southern cities do have Spanish-fluent enforcement officials.
In its eight-state Southeastern region, OSHA has a single Spanish-speaking
outreach worker. Marilyn Velez encourages workers and employers to avoid unsafe
practices.
It's not easy. Some wary workers see Velez as a police officer; others, having
survived abject poverty in rural Mexico and dangerous border crossing, feel
they don't need her.
"They are looking at you like, 'Are you crazy? I have done worse things,'"
Velez says. "It's just the way they see risk."
Sometimes the lessons do register. But America's Mexican labor force is
constantly in flux. Workers graduate to safer jobs, or perhaps they move back
home. Their replacements may be the next victims.
---
Associated Press researcher Julie Reed contributed to this report.
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