Repression could dissuade immigrant workers from reporting dangers

Sleeping employees phoned Ellen Widess in panic.

It was summer 2011. The workers complained to Cal / Osha, which Widss led at the time, of dangerous heat and other dangers in the warehouses of the inner Empire. Now workers have said high-ups threatened to call the immigration authorities if they persisted.

Widess said she had called federal officials and implored them to avoid any repression of immigration while workers raised the alarm on dangerous conditions. It worked, she said.

But Widess said that if it happened today, it would not count on such pleas.

President Trump is committed to carrying out mass deportations and returned a federal policy that prevented immigration agents from arresting people in hospitals, churches and schools.

Its promises – as well as highly publicized raids in New York and Chicago – have increased the fear of immigrants who could be at risk of expulsion. Occupational safety experts have warned that it could prevent them from talking about work -based threats, hindering efforts to stop dangers and diseases.

“Workers are the Canaries,” said Debbie Berkowitz, a purse from the University of Georgetown and a former federal security and health official with President Obama. “We need them to speak if there are problems to prevent a pandemic. And nobody is going to speak because they are afraid that the company calls the ice. “”

An immigration and customs’ application spokesperson has returned questions about such concerns to the OSHA, who have not made any comments.

The California Department of Industrial Relations, which includes CAL / OSHA, said in a statement that no worker should feel intimidated or fear of exercising its rights. “The laws of labor in California protect all workers, regardless of immigration status and California guarantees confidentiality in the declaration of dangerous conditions, he said.

Thurka Sangoramoory, an American university anthropologist who studied immigrant workers, said that all workers have the right to report dangerous working conditions, regardless of immigration status.

“But what’s going on in practice is a completely different thing,” she said. “The application climate makes workers who do not want to exercise their rights.”

An analysis published by the We Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, an independent research organization based in Michigan, revealed that when the American counties participated in an immigration application program in the past, the result was ” A substantial reduction in complaints to government security regulators, but increased injuries, in workplace with Hispanic workers. »»

Immigrants work disproportionately in more dangerous industries such as forestry and construction and are more likely to die at work than other workers, with particularly high mortality rates in Mexican immigrants, revealed researchers Vanderbilt Law School.

In California, they work with dairies where they could be at risk of avian flu. They build houses and collect crops in burning heat. In the County of Los Angeles, they became the face of an alarming epidemic of silicosis, a fatal pulmonary disease caused by the inhalation of dust loaded with crystalline silica, in young workers who cut the counters.

Maegan Ortiz, executive director of the Educacion Popular Del Instituto in California, said that “they are already workers who are extremely difficult to find”. In recent weeks, she said, daily attendance has been reduced in two in a Van Nuys center that the group operates for day workers.

During training in Los Angeles for workers who clean after forest fires, a discussion on the wearing of respirators quickly turned to “What if the ice arises?” said Kevin Riley, Director of the UCLA occupational safety and health program. “It’s so at the forefront of the minds of these workers.”

In the Bakersfield region, where a recent border patrol operation lasted days and led dozens of arrests, Paula Flores expressed concerns about the deportation as it was cutting a row of vines.

In the current state of things, she said, she has no complaints about her current job. But the threat of raids could make workers confronted with abusive supervisors reflect twice before reporting the dangers, she said.

“Imagine if they have threatened us with immigration,” said Flores, a Mexican immigrant who has been in the United States for almost three decades in Spanish. “Obviously, no one would bring anything.”

Government regulators unable to present themselves in each workplace are based on workers’ complaints to direct them to problems, experts said. An AFL-CIO analysis estimated that with existing personnel, inspectors would take more than 200 years to reach all construction sites in California.

The system “must necessarily count on workers who manifest themselves,” said Widess, former director of Cal / Osha.

For years, Ice has undergone internal advice to prevent the agency from being armed in disputes, said Jessie Hahn, principal lawyer on labor and employment policy for national immigration Law Center. These policies have been guided by the fact that “it has been a long time since the private parties have been trying to use the application of immigration to gain the top in a dispute,” said Hahn.

The Ministry of Internal Security offered a “discretionary protection on a case -by -case basis to the victims who lack employment authorization”, indicates its website. This practice helps “work and employment agencies to invest more fully on violations of the work site”, according to the ministry.

In Georgia, such insurance has been crucial that chemical regulators have studied how a fatal cloud from liquid nitrogen killed six workers in a poultry transformation center, said Shelly Anand, executive director of legal collaboration immigrant rights and workers’ rights.

Obtaining temporary protection against expulsion “was so critical for immigrant workers to manifest themselves,” said Anand.

A 50 -year -old Mexican immigrant who worked in the establishment of Georgia declared in Spanish that it had made him feel more protected. “We are not afraid to speak, or that because we have no status, we cannot express ourselves,” she said.

Hahn stressed that such policies were discretionary. The defenders of immigrants have prompted to consolidate these protections with a federal bill that would expand the admissibility to the visa to workers cooperating with regulators to expose labor violations, so far without success.

A spokesperson for the ICE has referred to Times’ questions as to whether the agency would hold the workplace raids in the midst of a health or security survey at the Federal OSHA, which n ‘did not comment.

Georgetown Berkowitz said raids in the workplace on poultry plants under the first Trump administration had lasting effects on workers later, “when Covid ran through these meat packaged plants.”

“Because Trump made these raids known and went to workplaces, people were terrified to express themselves. And it was only after the hospitals have been exceeded that people began to pay attention. »»

The epidemics covored by meat packaging, in turn, affected people far beyond the production lines: an analysis concluded that in July 2020, up to 8% of cases nationwide were Associated with close cattle factories and the vast majority of these cases were not part of the cases, including the workers themselves.

The danger that work diseases are not detected could be exacerbated if immigrants avoid hospitals and clinics where doctors may diagnose and relaunch emerging threats, experts said. In the current state of things, undocumented immigrants are faced with financial, legal and linguistic obstacles looking for health care, said Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi, Deputy Professor of Professional and Environmental Medicine at UC San Francisco .

“Everything that aggravates one of these factors would make it less likely that they are looking for care … unless it is an absolute emergency,” said Gandhi.