The increasingly militarized harassment of immigrants upending our communities across the country has been well understood. Less recognized is how these anti-immigrant policies are undermining the safety of immigrant workers on the job, resulting in more health and safety violations, more injuries and fewer worker complaints. The solution is more unions.
This is the conclusion of a recent study: When Labor Enforcement and Immigration Enforcement Collide: Deterring Worker Complaints Worsens Workplace Safety, by Amanda M. Grittner and Prof. Matthew S. Johnson, which shows that the deeply negative economic impact of the anti-immigrant policies extends to workplace health and safety.
Relying on data from the “Secure Communities” partnership between federal ICE agents and local law enforcement from the 2010s, the authors document dramatic negative impacts of immigration enforcement on worker health and safety. Looking at workplaces with a high percentage of Hispanic workers, they show that complaints to OSHA dropped off dramatically while injuries rose significantly.
Because the author’s important findings are presented in a dense academic paper and often look like this, a general audience may find it challenging to unpack.
At Worksafe we wanted to bring this information to wider attention, illustrating these important points:
- Immigration enforcement overlapped with a large decrease in health and safety complaints while at the same time leading to a large increase in injuries (and minimum wage violations) among workplaces with Hispanic workers. (Table 1 p.14)
- Immigration enforcement led to worse compliance with OSHA regulations among workplaces with Hispanic Workers (Table 3 p23)
- Unionized workers were largely shielded from the increase in barriers to complain about health and safety, providing new evidence of how unions facilitate the enforcement of labor regulations (Table 4 p31)
The workplace health and safety impacts of this targeting of immigrants may not be top of mind for most people. With community members being stripped of due process and disappeared into prisons across the US — and even overseas; with reporters, congressmembers and union leaders arrested and intimidated by masked federal agents; and with families being torn apart, there are certainly more immediate and dramatic impacts from this terrible onslaught on our communities.
It’s very powerful to see how much that negative impact is reduced when you have a union in your workplace.
But these workplace health and safety problems are a major part of the whole story about why Trump’s immigration purge is terrible public policy that is creating these negative, but completely foreseeable workplace impacts: more and more worker injuries, more deaths and more fear.
And finally, it’s very powerful to see how much that negative impact is reduced when you have a union in your workplace.
Credit: Charts by Amira-Sade Moodie.