Workplace deaths rise in California, nation

Tyche Hendricks, Chronicle Staff Writer

Tuesday, April 29, 2008


The number of workplace deaths is rising again in California and nationally after a steady decline during the past decade. The fatality rate is especially high for immigrants, particularly those from Latin America, according to federal data.

In 2006, the most recent year for which statistics are available, 5,840 people nationwide suffered fatal injuries on the job, according to an analysis of data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released Monday by the AFL-CIO. Almost 10 percent of the deaths were in California, and Latinos nationwide were 25 percent more likely to be killed in the workplace than workers overall, the report found.

"One of the reasons there's a sharp increase is that Latino workers are in the most dangerous industries and jobs and they're often exploited by employers, with little or no protection," said Rachele Huennekens, a spokeswoman for the AFL-CIO.

The report found that the most dangerous industries were agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting - with 30 deaths per 100,000 workers. Mining had 28 deaths per 100,000 workers and transportation and warehousing had 17 deaths per 100,000.

Although construction wasn't ranked among the most dangerous industries - with 11 deaths per 100,000 - more construction workers died, 1,239, from workplace injuries than workers in any other industry.

Last year a laundry worker for the Cintas Corp. in Oklahoma named Eleazar Torres-Gomez was killed after he freed a jammed-up wad of wet blue jeans on a conveyor belt and fell into the industrial dryer with the clothes.

San Jose resident Maria Espinoza, who also works for Cintas, the nation's largest uniform supplier, testified at a congressional hearing last week about the case and met the family of the dead man there.

"I felt so sad because his death could have been avoided," said Espinoza, who has been injured on the job herself and is trying to organize her co-workers into a union in hopes of improving workplace safety. "There should have been better protection and better training."

Part of the growing safety problem, according to the AFL-CIO, is that the budget and staffing of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which inspects workplaces for dangerous conditions, have been cut in recent years.

Not everyone sees a connection between OSHA and workplace safety, however.

"The accident rate in the mid '70s was 1 in 10,000 and today it's 1 in 250,000, so it's really silly to say there has not been great progress," said David Theroux, president of the libertarian Independent Institute in Oakland. "The view that OSHA had something to do with it is a real stretch. It's not in the self-interest of a business to have these injuries, they don't want these huge costs. It's true the fines are trivial, but the point is, the insurance costs are gigantic."

While more workers died in the U.S. in 2006, the death rate remained steady at 4 per 100,000 from 2005 to 2006, due to an increase in the number of people in the workforce. The death rate, however, increased among Latino workers - from 4.7 per 100,000 to 5 per 100,000.

That's partly because Latino workers include many immigrants who tend to be concentrated in dangerous occupations, like agriculture and construction, said Maria Blanco, director of the Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity at UC Berkeley's Law School, which had studied similar issues.

Workers who don't speak or read English are often at greater risk because they don't understand safety instructions, Blanco said. And for some immigrants, the need for the job is so great that they're less willing to walk away from a risky situation, she said.

"That combination has created this concentration of injuries and deaths," said Blanco. "Two things could make a huge difference. First, job training and postings have to be bilingual. And since it's easy to see the industries where the deaths are focused, it should be possible to have targeted accident education and enforcement."
See the report

To see the AFL-CIO's report, "Death on the Job," go to links.sfgate.com/ZDET

E-mail Tyche Hendricks at thendricks@sfchronicle.com.
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I HAVE A BETTER IDEA! TRY REQUIRING WORKERS TO READ, WRITE AND SPEAK THE LANGUAGE OF THIS COUNTRY.......ENGLISH!!!