Safety advocates are beginning to understand why minority and marginalized workers are more frequently killed or injured on the job than their white and often more socioeconomically privileged counterparts and what can be done to curb an annual statistic that has stumped some industries.
Rethinking onboarding and training protocols and giving greater attention to the wider concerns of undocumented workers can go some way to relieving the problem, experts say.
While employers are more often considering such solutions, some safety experts say the focus on the issue is long overdue, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics has for years reported disparate annual illness and injury and fatality rates for Black and Hispanic workers and those who work in higher-risk, lower-paid industries that don’t require college education when compared with their white and college-educated counterparts.
“There’s ample data going back decades that shows that Black and Latino workers have the most dangerous, dirtiest job assignments, and immigrant Latino workers typically face a higher risk of both fatal and nonfatal injuries on the job,” said Jessica Martinez, Los Angeles-based co-executive director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health.
“This is compounded with, obviously, the socio-determining factors of the communities that they work in, or the struggles these communities have that lead them to take these jobs as survival mode, knowing that they’re walking sometimes into these dangers and high-hazard industries,” she said.
Looking at the higher risk of musculoskeletal disorders – and not just the deadlier incidents — among diverse and underprivileged populations is a key focus because “there’s a connection between the social determinants of health and occupational health inequities,” said Sarah Ischer, senior program manager of the MSD Solutions Lab at the National Safety Council in Itasca, Illinois.
“We must consider (diversity, equity and inclusion) factors in relation to risk and prevention, addressing many issues pertaining to health disparities under diverse working populations,” she said.
The issue is “systemic,” said I. David Daniels, Atlanta-based president and CEO of ID2 Solutions LLC, which provides occupational health and safety consulting for companies.
Safety management systems are historically one-size-fits-all, Mr. Daniels said, adding that bias and “underlying ignorance” of the issues faced by workers spanning races, cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds frequently are not considered when designing safety programs.
Employers are steadily learning that safety goes beyond training requirements, said Pam Walaski, Templeton, Pennsylvania-based president of the American Society of Safety Professionals. The ASSP’s Safety ’24 conference last month in Denver dedicated nearly a dozen panels and breakout groups to discussing the intersection of DEI and safety.
“The majority of folks in the safety industry understand that we owe it to our workers, many of whom are in lower socioeconomic classes, to make sure that the workplace is created in a way that there are no barriers to participation and to working safely,” she said.
Language and education differences when it comes to designing training materials are a clear-cut factor, experts say (see story page 18). But employers should be aware of more subtle barriers to addressing workplace safety inequalities, they say. Recent studies show that such issues as financial worries, perceived discrimination, fear of losing one’s job, and retaliation are some of the factors that create unsafe environments for marginalized workers.
“If they’re undocumented workers, obviously they do not want to pop up on the radar,” said Vik Ramaswamy, Nashville, Tennessee-based director of risk control for workers compensation insurer Safety National Casualty Corp.
“They want to do their work, collect their checks and quietly go away,” he said. “They want to stay away from being detected. … They have a counterincentive to raising their hand, in addition to a language barrier.”
In June, the National Safety Council released a report analyzing connections between DEI and safety practices and found “psychological safety” to be among the reasons marginalized groups are unlikely to report unsafe working conditions.
The study found that “(v)oice suppression can prove particularly harmful to employees of color, as they may already perceive their voices and opinions as less valued than the majority group.”
As a result, “Black and Hispanic workers report the most unease about reporting unsafe work conditions when compared to other racial and ethnic groups,” the nonprofit advocacy group reported, adding that other research — such as U.S. Department of Labor studies — have found that fear of job and income loss spurs the discomfort in reporting unsafe practices and, in some cases, injuries.
A study published in 2022 in the Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health by the School of Public Health at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston examined sentiments among day laborers, finding that 42% reported injuries and 81% said they considered discrimination to be a contributing factor in their unwillingness to report injuries.
Fear related to economics is another issue, said Robert Sharp, Madison, Wisconsin-based regional health, safety, security, environment and quality manager for the Americas at Enerpac Tool Group Corp., an industrial machinery and tools provider.
“If you have someone that is in an unstable economic situation, or maybe doesn’t have a college degree or a (high school equivalency) that severely limits where they can work. This creates this kind of micro-stress in the back of their head that every decision that they make in the workplace is going to affect the outcome of their employment,” he said, adding that such socioeconomic factors can create distractions.
Mr. Sharp used car trouble as an example of an issue that may affect a worker’s ability to focus.
“You worry about getting to work on time or getting home,” he said. “If people are not focused on the job at hand, what’s going to stop them from putting their hand in the machine because they’re not thinking about the work or what they are doing because everything at home is causing stress?”
Risk tolerance is another barrier to safety when it comes to marginalized communities, said Monique Parker, Belmont, North Carolina-based senior vice president of safety, environment & health at Piedmont Lithium Inc., a mining company with sites in North Carolina, Tennessee, Canada and Ghana.
A key to managing the problem is “not assuming that everybody’s risk tolerance is the same but understanding that people inherently take greater risks because they’ve had to face risks throughout their life,” she said.
“We can do a better job of educating and training and having a system of identifying a risk and then teaching someone how to evaluate that risk from another lens. That is going to be very important as we keep individuals safe, regardless of where they’re starting from,” she said.
Ms. Parker said a best practice for employers is to revamp onboarding to find out more about who new employees are and their challenges, she said.
“We need to do the onboarding process differently, where we truly understand where people are starting from,” she said.
“Because when someone’s trying to get a job, they’re putting their best foot forward, they’re making everything sound like they have it all together. But I think more organizations need to do a better job of getting to the root of where their starting point is.”
Enlisting minorities in the safety process also helps, Ms. Parker said.
“I bring those employees in and put them on our safety committee so that they can have more of a voice and be more visible in helping us find some of the areas that may not be as safe because it would be a welcoming environment for them to speak up,” she said.
Employers should also revamp how safety concerns are voiced, according to the National Safety Council’s study, which suggested using anonymous reporting systems to encourage workers to talk about issues of concern without fear of retaliation. The council provides employers access to a free survey they can give employees to gauge concerns, Ms. Ischer said.
Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health Doug Parker, head of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, said whistleblower protocols are essential to an employer’s safety program.
“Employers must have a relationship with their employees where they will raise these issues, ideally to (the employer) so that you can fix them; but you need to make clear to your employees also that they have the right to contact OSHA,” he said.
Employers must rethink training strategies to reach workers
Language barriers pose the most prominent obstacles to safety training, yet increasingly, it’s workers’ levels of education and comprehension that are significant differentiators in who receives adequate instruction, according to experts.
The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration requires that workers be trained in a language they can understand, and employers can be cited for failing to do so. OSHA, however, does not maintain statistics on companies that fail to provide such language-based training, according to an agency spokeswoman.
Companies rely on translation services and increasingly artificial intelligence to bridge the language gaps in their workforces, experts say. Yet even when someone professes to understand and speak English, gaps remain.
Not speaking and understanding English “in the same level of proficiency that others do” is a contributing factor in workplace safety training lapses, said Luz Marin, an associate professor in the Department of Safety Sciences at Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s College of Health and Human Services.
Even when language barriers are addressed, comprehension can remain a concern because even English-speaking workers may not understand some safety issues, said Gwen Navarrete Klapperich, chief learning consultant with Kapolei, Hawaii-based Klapperich International Training Associates LLC, which provides safety training consulting.
According to U.S. Department of Education statistics, 54% of Americans read at a fifth-grade level or below, said Ms. Klapperich, whose background is in education. Attempting to reach workers with safety training that may go beyond their comprehension is a common problem for employers, she said.
In addition, few workers, due to discomfort or embarrassment, raise their hand and admit they do not understand training, Ms. Klapperich added.
Simplifying training materials, adding photographs and getting more hands-on with training can help, she said.
Training audits can also help, Ms. Klapperich said.
“It’s not enough to just have a sign-in sheet with people saying, okay, they signed it,” she said. “The trainer really has to assess, when this person is going out into the job, did they meet the objectives of the training?”
Monique Parker, Belmont, North Carolina-based senior vice president of safety, environment & health at Piedmont Lithium Inc., said safety professionals must address literacy among underprivileged communities to improve training.
“Employers should do better due diligence on understanding where their employees are when they bring them into an organization,” she said.
This article was first published in Business Insurance.
