Construction Workers, Immigrants Among 62 Worker Deaths in 2021
Date Posted: April 28, 2022
Posted In: News, Workforce,
From Boston Globe: Two men killed at a downtown Boston construction site last year were risking their lives on many fronts, according to a new report about workplace fatalities detailing the state’s most perilous jobs and the workers who do them.
Jordy Alexander Castaneda Romero and Juan Carlos Figueroa Gutierrez, who were hit by a dump truck and knocked into a nine-foot-deep trench on High Street, worked in the most dangerous industry in the state, which in 2021 once again accounted for the largest share of fatal workplace injuries in the state, according to the Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health and the Massachusetts AFL-CIO. Like all 15 construction workers killed on the job last year, they worked for a nonunion employer, which research has shown to be significantly less safe than union companies.
They were also men, who are far more likely to die at work, and immigrants, who made up nearly a third of deadly occupational injuries in the state last year, more than double the share who lost their lives at work in 2020 and 2019.
And they were involved in a transportation-related accident, the leading cause of fatal on-the-job accidents last year.
In all, 62 workers died on the job in 2021, according to the annual “Dying for Work” report, released Wednesday. Fatal injuries accounted for 52 deaths, and 10 firefighters died from work-related diseases. This is up from 45 fatalities in 2020, when many workplaces were shut down during the early months of the pandemic, leading to fewer occupational deaths, but down from each of the three years before that.
The death rate last year — 1.8 per 100,000 workers — was similar to what it was in 2019 and 2018. That means that even though there were fewer workers out on job sites as many people continued working from home, the many immigrants and people of color who worked on the front lines throughout the pandemic represented a greater proportion of those likely to get hurt, said Jodi Sugerman-Brozan, executive director of MassCOSH. At the same time, employers anxious to make a profit after pandemic-induced interruptions were cutting corners on safety measures, she said.
The deaths of Romero, 27, and Gutierrez, 33, who each left behind a wife and two children, are “symbolic of all the risks that we talk about that immigrant workers face all the time,” Sugerman-Brozan said. “Sadly, it’s also symbolic of employers who don’t care about the health and safety of their workers.”
The two men’s deaths were also included in a report released Wednesday by the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, which puts out an annual “Dirty Dozen” list of employers that egregiously expose workers to preventable hazards. Both the national and state COSH reports call out violations by their employer, Atlantic Coast Utilities in Wayland, whose owner was indicted for perjury in November for lying about past safety violations to obtain a Boston construction permit. An OSHA investigation found that the company had failed to conduct worksite inspections to address hazards, including the risk of being hit by construction vehicles.