Team Project Summaries from 2004-7

1. Investigating Janitorial Chemical Hazards: "So Safe You Can Eat It"  
2. Overhead Drilling in the Construction Trades
3. Summertime Blues: Heat Stress in a Fabric-coating Factory
4. Heavenly Beds, Backbreaking Work: Hotel Room Cleaners
5. Day Laborers in Los Angeles  Survey of Hazards
6. Bricklayer Exposure to Silica Dust
7. Heat Illness among California Farmworkers
8. Chinese Restaurant Worker Hazards
9. New York Public Employees Federation (PEF) Violence Prevention Project
10. Health and Safety at Work: Immigrant Retail Workers in Brooklyn

Bricklayer Exposure to Silica Dust

Sponsors and Mentors

• Bricklayers and Allied Craft Workers Union (BAC) Local 3 in Oakland, representing 3,000 workers in northern California
• Occupational Health Branch of the California Department of Health Services, with support from the national Center to Protect Workers Rights (CPWR)

Bricklayers and Allied Craft Workers Union (BAC) Local 3 in Oakland, California approached OHIP staff, concerned about worker exposure to high levels of silica dust while cutting bricks, blocks, and concrete with saws. Exposure to silica has long been known to cause silicosis, a disabling and often fatal lung disease.  Union members often refer to silicosis as "the big elephant in the living room that never gets talked about." Many had tested positive for silicosis in a union-based screening program.

The local union wanted to gain a better understanding of the circumstances determining saw selection and the barriers to using the safer "wet saws," which generate much less dust than dry or "quickie" saws.

Two teams of interns worked with Local 3 during summers 2005 and 2006. They included two pre-med undergraduates, a public health student, and graduate student in architecture who subsequently enrolled in an occupational health nursing program.  The students were enrolled at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University.

The first set of interns developed a questionnaire to assess saw selection, respirator use, and common work practices. They interviewed members of the Bricklayers Union (in English and Spanish) in person and by phone.  Using a job checklist they developed, the two interns visited several construction sites to observe work practices during the cutting of bricks. They learned that the state of New Jersey had banned the use of dry saws without local exhaust ventilation, and countries such as Sweden have worked to develop silica-free construction materials.  As part of their final report, they provided the union with bi-lingual worker education materials on silicosis developed by NIOSH.

The second set of students continued to document the silica-related hazards associated with the use of dry saws to cut tiles and bricks and researched the feasibility of alternatives to dry cutting. They gathered information on the implementation of the New Jersey law through interviews with key stakeholders for Local 3. They developed and disseminated several educational materials for workers (English/Spanish), and an engineering controls fact sheet for supervisors and contractors.

One student remarked at the end of the summer, "I learned about workplace hazards in a way that helped me better understand the impacts of certain social conditions, like low wages, on worker health and safety.  My experience in OHIP was instrumental in solidifying my decision to apply to the Occupational and Environmental Health Nurse Practitioner Program at UC San Francisco.