Implications of workers center on health and safety training for immigrant populations

This paper will discuss the use of pre-existing data to track occupational safety and health outcomes among immigrant workers in the informal sector and potentially to identify simple data collection strategies for future surveillance or intervention effectiveness measurement. The existing data comes from an established workers' rights center that provides outreach training focused on worker rights and facilitating worker-led actions to address identified problems such as discrimination and wage theft,including workplace injury and hazard concerns. Data were originally entered into a Filemaker-Pro database by worker center staff and transferred to SAS V9.2.

987 workers enrolled between March, 2005 and February 2009. 65% were male, 35% were female, 0.3% (n=3) were missing gender status and 84% Latino. The most frequently spoken primary languages were Spanish(62 %) and Polish(11%). 91% reported working in manual labor jobs. At enrollment, 40% had been fired or laid off, 13% quit their jobs due to unfair conditions, 17% were still employed, and 29% had missing data in this category. Workers filed complaints when they felt that they had been treated unfairly or discriminated against while on the job. There were 32 OSHA complaints during this time period. The Worker Center provides a meaningful organizational platform for fair treatment for clients that may have language barriers and little to no resources for worker justice in that 16 companies were fined by a regulatory agency, and 200 of the wage and hour complaints were resolved.