Minorities, Latino Immigrants Face Greatest Risk of Workplace Injuries, Disability.

Hispanic immigrant and African American men have a higher risk than other workers of getting injured on the job, and the disparity may be driven in part by discrimination, according to a new study co-authored by a School of Public Health researcher.

The study, in the journal Health Affairs, found that workers ages 18 to 64 who are Hispanic immigrants had the highest workplace injury rate, at 13.7 percent per 1,000 workers, followed by African American men (more than 12 percent), and US-born Hispanic men (nearly 12 percent). The injury rate for white men was 11.8 percent, and for Asian Americans nearly 10 percent. Other ethnicities had a rate of about 11 percent.

The research team—Les Boden, professor of environmental health, and Seth Seabury and Sophie Terp of the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine—analyzed two sets of data with similar demographic characteristics. One set, from the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey from 2006 to 2013, included 11.6 million respondents. The other, the Survey of Income and Program Participation by the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (for years 1996, 2001, 2004, and 2008), included 198,000 respondents.

The researchers found that a higher expected workplace injury rate was linked to an elevated risk of disability, especially for older workers ages 50 to 64. African Americans in this age bracket had a 4.4 percent rate of work-related disability, followed by foreign-born Hispanics (4.2 percent); Asian Americans (4 percent) and US-born Hispanics (3.5 percent). Older whites had the lowest disability rate—about 2.5 percent.

The researchers did not identify the underlying causes of the disparities, but they noted that discrimination has long been a factor in poor worker safety. They cited a history of discrimination in hiring and promotion and of assigning black and Hispanic workers to the riskiest tasks.

“Based on our findings, policy makers and regulators may need to review whether employers are systematically assigning people of different races and ethnicities different jobs or job tasks according to their risk,” they wrote.

“Care needs to be taken to ensure that efforts to make workplaces safer do not at the same time reduce economic opportunities for vulnerable populations,” they said. “The issues raised here will only become more salient and politically charged as the US population continues to become more diverse.”

In a separate but related study published online by the Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health, Boden and co-authors found that undercounting of occupational injuries in employers’ administrative data was higher for black workers than white workers, obscuring disparities in risk. They said that “more sensitive data collection by employers and large population-based surveys, including routine collection of data on worker demographics such as race, could help reduce obscuring of disparities.”

That study, led by Erika Sabbath of Boston College School of Social Work, used data from surveys of more than 1,500 hospital patient-care workers who were asked whether they had been injured at work during the previous year. Those responses were compared to the hospital’s injury report database.

About one-quarter of workers said they had not reported injuries to the hospital, with higher percentages of black and Hispanic employees not reporting. The study cites concerns about confirming negative racial stereotypes and about confidentiality as possible factors in the lower reporting rates.

Both studies were funded by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

—Lisa Chedekel