NYCOSH Testimony to the Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Safety and Training of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Washington, DC, February 27, 2002

Mr. Chairman, and Members of the Committee:

I am Omar Henriquez, the coordinator of Youth and Immigrant Project of the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH).

NYCOSH is a private, non-profit, union-based health and safety organization located in Manhattan. Over 200 local unions in the metropolitan area are members of NYCOSH, as are several hundred individual workplace health and safety activists, health care professionals, and workers' compensation attorneys. NYCOSH has been providing technical assistance and comprehensive training in occupational safety and health to unions, employers, government agencies, and community organizations for over twenty years.

NYCOSH is part of a the National COSH Network, national network of 22 similar non-profit safety and health training and advocacy organizations, located in 17 states.

While it is an honor to have this opportunity to testify, the conditions that bring me here are nothing to be proud of. There is nothing honorable in immigrant workers having to sacrifice their lives in record numbers while they contribute to the economic well-being of this great nation. Nor can we be proud of depriving this colossal work force of the most basic safety and health protections granted to every other worker in America.

It is estimated that between twenty-eight and thirty million immigrants live in the United States, slightly more than 10.4% of the U.S. population. Ninety percent of these are of working age. In the large immigrant states, three out of every four tailors, cooks, and textile workers are immigrants. And nationally, the majority of taxi drivers, garment, agricultural and domestic workers are immigrants.

As workers, immigrants have a disproportionate rate of accidents and fatalities in the workplace. We are hired to do the most undesirable and dangerous jobs at the lowest wages. We often do not know what rights we have or what laws protect us and we receive no training in safety and health. Language and cultural barriers make it difficult to learn of our rights and particularly those who lack immigration status are fearful to speak out. We are considered disposable and therefore easy to exploit.

Immigrant workers, though supplying needed resources to keep America growing, are not granted the most basic rights that other workers enjoy. Nowhere is this more evident than in the occupational safety and health of immigrant workers. For instance, Latino workers, who comprise 11 percent of the U.S. labor force, experienced 14 percent of the fatal occupational injuries in 2000, up from 11.4 percent in 1994-99. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics nationwide in the year 2000, 849 foreign-born workers were killed on the job, of these 494 or 58 percent were of Latino origin.

NYCOSH has a great deal of direct experience with the lack of safety and health protections for immigrant workers. Most recently, NYCOSH has collaborated with to other non-profit organizations to operate a mobile medical unit, which provides free medical examinations, training and respiratory protection to the thousands of non-unionized, overwhelmingly immigrant workers who have been hired to clean up dust and debris in businesses, and apartments and institutions that are located adjacent to the World Trade Center.

The mobile medical unit began operations on January 14. Since then, physicians who specialize in occupational medicine have examined approximately 350 non-unionized day laborers -- the vast majority of them immigrants -- who have been employed in the clean-up effort near the World Trade Center. Virtually every worker who we have examined (more than 99 percent) has symptoms of exposure to dust that is irritating to the respiratory system. Of course, we know that workers who have not experienced any health problems are not likely to come to our unit for an examination, but identifying such a large number of workers with respiratory distress is a very strong indication that the day laborers are receiving no safety and health training, or training that is inadequate, that the OSHA regulations intended to protect them are inadequate, and the enforcement of those regulations is inadequate.

We are very pleased that OSHA has recently decided to declare lower Manhattan to be a Local Emphasis Program site, and thereby step up its inspection activity in the area, but we would like to emphasize that OSHA's decision to do so results in a large part from the results of outreach that NYCOSH has done that was funded by this year's Susan Harwood Training Grant.

As you know, the Susan Harwood Training Grant program was put in place by Congress and the U.S. Department of Labor to insure that sufficient resources be devoted providing essential safety and health training to workers who have an exceptionally great need for it, including immigrant workers and other vulnerable workers.

But in his latest budget request for OSHA, President Bush has proposed reductions in the very programs that have a proven record of educating and training these vulnerable workers from $11.2 million to only $4.0 million. The President's budget proposes to eliminate OSHA's very successful Susan Harwood Training Grant program. The administration has even gone so far as to tell us that it will not spend Susan Harwood Training Grant money that is in the current budget, after having been approved and appropriated last year.

With funds provided by a Susan Harwood Training Grant, the National COSH Network has trained over 6,000 vulnerable workers in 15 months, accomplishing over 200 percent of our training goals. Since I was a part of this effort, I can tell you with absolute confidence, that no amount of written material, web-based education, toll-free hotlines or partnerships, such as those being proposed, are going to replace the hands-on training that we deliver under this grant.

We were not only able to train this vulnerable and under-served population in a personal and humane manner, but in addition, our outreach efforts were able to forge alliances and working relationships with numerous immigrant organizations in our areas. These relationships, for example, produced a first-time meeting between OSHA and immigrant organizations in Long Island. But most importantly, by working with immigrant organizations that already have the trust of immigrant workers, we were able to assist the organization We Make the Road by Walking in Brooklyn, to file an OSHA complaint on behalf of an immigrant worker who had been exposed to toxic chemicals in his workplace. This case resulted in OSHA issuing the company multiple, serious violations, fining it thousands of dollars and ordering it to change its unlawful practices.

We are pleased that Secretary Chao and OSHA have acknowledged that there is a special need to protect immigrant workers. And, while OSHA's initiatives to protect Hispanic workers are commendable and necessary, these initiatives do not accommodate or include other immigrant groups that are also a part of the labor force. A Spanish-language hotline and web page are useful only to those who speak and read Spanish. For those who speak other languages these services will not help. And for those with limited literacy, and for the majority that do not have access to the Internet, the web page will not be useful. Under the training grants that we now have, but which we will lose if Congress adopts the President's proposed Labor Department budget, we had the flexibility to train immigrant workers in their native languages at a level that was appropriate and in a style that was the most effective for the learning process. We have translated multilingual materials, thanks to organized labor. We are opposed to any effort, however well-intended, that excludes a significant number of the workers that need the information.

In New York and in many cities throughout our country, there is an enormous need for more OSHA enforcement officials who are fluent in languages other than English. The protection afforded to workers by the Occupational Safety and Health Act is particularly important to the most vulnerable members of the workforce, including those who do not speak English. OSHA cannot adequately protect those workers if it cannot communicate with them. OSHA has an affirmative obligation to hire enough bi-lingual compliance officers and translators in order to insure that all workers enjoy the protection of the OSH Act.

Thanks to the Susan Harwood Grant to the National COSH Network, we have recently been able to reach out to tens of thousands of workers to whom we previously had very little access. But there are many hundreds of thousands of other workers, immigrants from Russia, China, Korea, Vietnam, Haiti and dozens of other countries that we still have very little access to. To far too great an extent, OSHA is in the same predicament.

OSHA must increase its efforts to effectively enforce the requirement that employers report workplace fatalities within eight hours. How can OSHA properly investigate fatalities that it never learns about, or learns about days or weeks after they occur? Just last month OSHA learned of the death of an immigrant worker doing clean-up work in the vicinity of the World Trade Center. When OSHA investigated and confirmed the fatality, it proposed to fine the employer $4000, a sum that might have the effect of deterring another employer from a similar violation. But then OSHA agreed top reduce the fine to $100, a mere slap on the wrist for a violation that strikes at the heart of OSHA's ability to protect workers.

Last year, on the average, OSHA fined employers that failed to make timely reports of fatalities more than $1,250 for each violation. Those penalties could have been substantially higher, but even a $1,250 fine is far better than a $100 fine. It is troubling, however, that OSHA issued a total of 143 citations for failure to report a fatality last year, a number that is much lower than the total number of fatalities that were not reported to OSHA.

For many years, NYCOSH has questioned the effectiveness of training non-union workers about their rights under the Occupational Safety and Health Act, because, in far too many cases, an attempt by a non-union worker to exercise those rights has been tantamount to asking to be fired. Now we are beginning to make progress on this important front, but without strong enforcement, stringent standards and education for workers, OSHA will be more like a lapdog than a watchdog.

Thank you for this opportunity to make our views known.