Higher on-the-job death rates among Latino workers have
become a
regular feature of reports on workplace fatalities. In 2012, the overall rate was 3.4 deaths per 100,000 workers, but for Latinos it was 3.7 per 100,000. But all jobs are not created equally safe, and construction is particularly dangerous—
for Latinos in particular, as Buzzfeed's David Noriega reports:
According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), between 2010 and 2013, the number of deaths among Latinos in the construction industry rose from 181 to 231. [...]
Over the last decade, construction work has gotten safer. The industry’s overall fatality rate dropped from 11.5 deaths per 100,000 workers in 2004 to 8.6 in 2013. Although Latinos die at higher rates than non-Latinos, they have also benefitted from this increase in safety: In the same period, their fatality rate dropped from 13.5 deaths per 100,000 workers to 9.8.
But that trend has begun to reverse in recent years — for Latinos only.
A majority of Latino workers killed on the job in 2012 were born outside the U.S., pointing to the ways immigrants are especially vulnerable to reckless bosses:
Immigrant workers are concentrated in non-union jobs with small contractors — the most freewheeling and least regulated corner of the industry. In New York, for example, several recent studies have found that federal inspections far more commonly uncover violations by small contractors than by large, unionized employers.
Bosses who care more about profit than about workers' lives don't have much to worry about—inspections are rare, penalties are extremely low, and criminal convictions almost never happen. Even when employers are convicted of crimes in worker deaths, they face little jail time. Noriega recounts the story of "the first time in recent history that a Staten Island contractor was found criminally liable for the death of a worker." First, contractor Kenneth Formica sent workers into an unsupported trench three times the depth at which trenches are legally required to have supports. Then, when the trench collapsed, completely burying one worker, Formica tried to get him out with an excavator, but decapitated him in the process (luckily [?] the man had already asphyxiated before he was decapitated). For this, Formica spent 16 weekends in jail, arriving Saturday morning and leaving Sunday evening. It doesn't seem to have been much of an incentive for Formica Construction to clean up its act—in November, Delfino Jesus Velazquez was killed on a construction job for which Formica had no permits. Earlier in November, a worker for a sanitation business owned by the Formica family had been killed on the job. Apparently the Formicas feel like the up side of running dangerous businesses outweighs the down side of dead workers, small fines, and a few weekends in jail.