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

Day Laborers in Los Angeles - Survey of Hazards

Sponsors and Mentors

• Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA), is a community-based worker center with a day laborers program. IDEPSCA works with six community job centers dispersed throughout the greater Los Angeles region. IDEPSCA and the Hollywood Community Job Center hosted our team of interns.
• UCLA LOSH staff provided academic supervision, with assistance from UCLA faculty in the Labor Studies Program.

The goal is this project was to document job-related hazards facing day laborers in Los Angeles County, by compiling survey data, facilitate hazard mapping during workshops, and conducting in-depth interviews with these workers in Spanish.  Day laborers face an array of health and safety hazards at multiple worksites, ranging from residential construction and demolition to painting and landscaping.  A first year medical student at University of California at Irvine worked with a graduate student in the Urban Planning program in UCLA's School of Public Affairs on this project.  The medical student was fluent in Spanish.

The students learned that the key to effective communication with these workers was to gain their trust over time at the job centers.  Earlier attempts at structured surveys were not effective and tended to intimidate the workers and limit the flow of information.  The team found that day laborers were generally aware of basic worker rights, but found it difficult to assert these rights. Similarly, workers were generally aware of health and safety hazards but still experienced injuries. Injured workers were reluctant to file for workers compensation and bore the cost of their medical treatment.  Most workers were not provided with respirators or other forms of personal protective equipment by their employer.  Workers received little or no orientation or safety training from their employers.  

The medical student noted at the end of the summer, "[I realized that] work is such a big part of life. The internship will definitely have an impact on my clinical practice…I see that I have to ask patients about their jobs to understand how working conditions affect their health."