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

 

Chinese Restaurant Worker Hazards

Sponsors and Mentors

• Chinese Progressive Association (CPA), a grassroots membership-based organization that works on wage and working condition issues in the Chinese community in the San Francisco Bay Area.
• The Labor Occupational Health Program (LOHP) at UC Berkeley  

This project helped initiate a new project by the CPA and LOHP to identify and address the health and safety concerns of Chinese-speaking employees of restaurants in San Francisco's Chinatown.  With the decline of the garment industry in San Francisco, the restaurant sector has emerged as the largest source of employment for the city's Chinese community. The workers face the usual obstacles of a low-wage immigrant workforce.   

The students initially met with key informants and conducted focus groups to gain a general understand of the concerns of the workers. These sessions were conducted in Mandarin, with translation services by one of our interns.  The interns also made several worksite visits, arranged by accompanying county health and fire inspectors in San Francisco and Oakland.  

While the students observed several traditional safety hazards, such as slippery and wet floors, narrow and cluttered walkways, poor ventilation of cooking areas and burns, these were not the primary concerns of the workers.  In an industry where less than half are paid the minimum wage and working hours can reach 70-80 hours a week, their main concerns are best understood in the context of "work organization" issues: low wages, deferred payment, long hours, no breaks, job insecurity, lack of job control, unclear work roles, and mistreatment by employers.  By validating their concerns using the work organization model, the students were able establish rapport with the workers, who were then more open to discussing simple solutions to traditional safety issues as part of an overall effort to improve restaurant safety. As part of their final product, the interns developed health and safety fact sheets in Mandarin for restaurant workers.

Two sets of interns worked on this project.  The 2005 interns included an undergraduate in Occidental College's Urban and Environmental Policy Planning program and a recent UC Berkeley graduate in sociology, who had worked as a Mandarin translator at the Community Occupational Health Project (COHP), a project of UCSF.  The 2006 interns were comprised of a recent graduate of the University of Washington, Masters of Public Health Program and an undergraduate majoring in medical anthropology at University of California at Santa Cruz.