The warehouse workers were calling Ellen Weides in panic.
It was the summer of 2011. Workers complained to Cal/OSHA. This was led by Widess at the time, as well as the dangerous heat and other dangers in the Inland Empire warehouses. Now, workers say top employees are threatening to call if immigration authorities are obsessed with it.
Widess said she called federal officials and begged them to avoid immigration crackdown. She said.
However, Widess said that if it happened today, she was not taken into consideration such a plea.
President Trump vowed to massive deportation and rewind a federal policy that restricts immigration agents from arresting people in hospitals, churches and schools.
His promises, along with heavily published attacks in New York City and Chicago, reinforced fear among immigrants who could be at risk of deportation. Workplace safety experts warn that it can prevent you from talking about job health threats and prevent efforts to stop dangers and illness.
“The workers are Canary,” said Debbie Berkowitz, a Georgetown University Fellow and former federal Occupational Safety and Health official under President Obama. “If there’s a problem to prevent the pandemic, they need to speak up, and no one is going to talk because they’re afraid that the company will call the ice.”
An immigration and customs enforcement spokesperson introduced OSHA questions about such concerns but did not provide a comment.
“Workers should not be threatened or feared to exercise their rights,” the California Department of Labor and Management Affairs, including CAL/OSHA, said in a statement. California’s labor laws said it protect all workers regardless of immigration circumstances and that California ensures confidentiality in reporting dangerous conditions.
Thurka Sangaramoorthy, an American university anthropologist who studied migrant workers, said that all workers have the right to report dangerous working conditions, regardless of the circumstances of the immigration.
“But what actually happens is completely different,” she said. “Due to the enforcement environment, workers do not want to exercise their rights.”
One analysis published by the independent research institute We Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, a Michigan-based research organization, shows that when US counties have previously participated in immigration enforcement programs, the results show that “complaints against government safety regulators” are “a complaint against government safety regulators. It has been seen that there has been a significant decrease, but an increase in injuries occurred. In the workplace with Hispanic workers.”
Immigrants work disproportionately in more dangerous industries such as forestry and construction, and are more likely to die from work than other workers, and have a particularly high mortality rate among Mexican immigrants, says Vanderbilt. Law school researchers discovered this.
In California, they work on dairy farms. They build houses and harvest crops with burnt heat. In Los Angeles County, they face the surprising outbreak of silicosis, a fatal lung disease caused by inhaling dust loaded with crystalline silica, among young workers who cut countertops. It’s become.
“These are already very difficult workers to find,” said Maegan Ortiz, executive director of Instituto de Educacion. In recent weeks, she said daily attendance has been cut in half at the Van Nuiss Centre, which the group runs for day workers.
The discussion about wearing respiratory tracts in training in LA for workers doing cleanup after Wildfires is “What if ICs appeared?” Director of UCLA Labor and Occupational Safety and Health Program Kevin Riley said. “We’re at the forefront of these workers’ minds.”
In the Bakersfield area, where recent border patrol operations have continued for several days and led to dozens of arrests, Paula Flores expressed concern about deportation when she pruned a line of Grapevine.
As of now, she said she is not unhappy with her current job. But the threat of the attack could make workers facing abusive supervisors think twice about reporting danger, she said.
“Imagine they threatened us with immigration,” Flores, a Mexican immigrant who has been in the US for nearly 30 years, said in Spanish. “Obviously no one reports anything.”
Government regulators who cannot appear in all workplaces rely on workers’ complaints to direct them into the issue, experts said. One of the analysis by the AFL-CIO estimated that existing staffing would take more than 200 years for inspectors to reach all California offices.
The system “inevitably has to rely on workers moving forward,” said former CAL/OSHA director Widess.
Jesse Hearn, senior adviser on labor and employment policy at the National Center for Immigration Law, has long had internal guidance to avoid ICE being weaponized in employment disputes. These policies were led to “a long risk that the Private Party would use immigration enforcement to gain an edge in the conflict.”
The Department of Homeland Security said on its website it “provides discretionary protection on a case-by-case basis to victims who lack employment permits.” The practice “helps labor and employment agencies to investigate workplace violations more fully,” according to the department.
In Georgia, such assurance is important as how chemical regulators investigated the fatal clouds that resulted from liquid nitrogen killed six workers at poultry processing facilities. said Shelley Anand, executive director of immigrant and workers’ rights non-profit legal cooperation.
Obtaining temporary protection from deportation was “very important to get migrant workers to come forward,” Anand said.
A 50-year-old Mexican immigrant working at a Georgia facility said Spanish made her feel more protected. “We’re not afraid to speak, or we can’t express ourselves because we don’t have status,” she said.
Hahn emphasized that such policies are discretionary. Immigration advocates have pushed them to enhance these protections with a federal bill that will work with regulators to expand visa eligibility for workers exposing labor violations.
An ICE spokesman introduced a question from the Times about whether workplaces refrain from workplace attacks during a health or safety investigation into federal OSHA, but did not provide any comments.
Berkowitz of Georgetown said workplace attacks on poultry plants under the first Trump administration had lasting effects on workers later.
“Trump made these attacks public and they went into the workplace and people were scared to speak up. And once the hospital overruns, people started paying attention.”
The emergence of communities in meat packing has affected people well beyond the production line. In one analysis, as of July 2020, up to 8% of cases across the country were approaching livestock plants, with the majority of those cases not among them. Workers themselves.
The risk of undetected workplace illness could be exacerbated if immigrants avoid hospitals and clinics where doctors can diagnose and issue alerts about new threats, experts said. At the moment, undocumented immigrants face financial, legal and linguistic barriers to seeking health care, said Dr. Sipali Gandhi, assistant professor of work environment medicine at UC San Francisco. .
“What exacerbates any of these factors will be less likely to seek care unless it is an absolute emergency,” Gandhi said.
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