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

Health and Safety at Work: Immigrant Retail Workers in Brooklyn

Sponsors and Mentors

• Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Employees Union (RWDSU) with assistance from Make the Road by Walking, a Brooklyn-based organization serving the immigrant community
• Hunter College, Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Department

Retail establishments in the Bushwick community of Brooklyn primarily employ immigrants from Central and South America. The union representing these workers had received complaints of inadequate safety training on lifting heavy weights, lock-ins at night in large supermarkets, and lack of proper ventilation, as well as problems faced by many immigrant workers: discrimination, fear of job loss, language barriers, and immigrant status.

In 2006, the interns surveyed this workforce through the union and community-based organizations in order to better document and describe specific health and safety concerns. The students developed a questionnaire used to interview workers in Spanish.  In addition to gathering information on a variety of safety issues (standing over 6 hours, no bathroom breaks, workplace violence, heavy lifting) the students found that 75% of workers injured on they did not report their injuries, and that 92% said their employer did not take action to prevent similar accidents in the future. The report concludes, "Workers want to improve the level of job-related information that they receive, to participate in the decision-making process at work, to be treated better by their employees, and to have their employers show greater flexibility."

The 2006 team was comprised of a recent graduate of the Masters in Labor Studies program at the University of Massachusetts and a student in the Masters of Public Health Program at Yale University.

Another intern team spent the summer 2007 focusing on specific hazards among retail drug store employees which included cashiers, stock clerks, drug clerks, pharmacy technicians and photo technicians. Their survey highlighted the major health and safety issues as musculoskeletal injuries, worksite violence and in-store security (store robberies), exposure to infectious customers, and stress.  This team included a graduate student in History and Public Health at Columbia University, teamed with a student entering University of Michigan's School of Public Health.