A Mexican Worker Dies Each Day...(and no pesky lawsuits)

[SoCalDem]

For each of these workers, there is probably a family member left behind who is too afraid to file a lwasuit becuase of their legal status.. This is the dirty secret about hiring undocemented workers.. They are afraid to complain, or they will be replaced.. They just roll the dice and go to work ..

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http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=519&ncid=716&e=7&u=/ap/20040314/ap_on_re_us/dying_to_work

A Mexican Worker Dies Each Day, AP Finds

Sun Mar 14, 9:39 AM ET Add U.S. National - AP to My Yahoo!


By JUSTIN PRITCHARD, Associated Press Writer

The jobs that lure Mexican workers to the United States are killing them in a worsening epidemic that is now claiming a victim a day, an Associated Press investigation has found. Though Mexicans often take the most hazardous jobs, they are more likely than others to be killed even when doing similarly risky work.



The death rates are greatest in several Southern and Western states, where a Mexican worker is four times more likely to die than the average U.S.-born worker. These accidental deaths are almost always preventable and often gruesome: Workers are impaled, shredded in machinery, buried alive. Some are 15 years old. For the first such study of Mexican worker deaths in the United States, The AP talked with scores of workers, employers and government officials and analyzed years of federal safety and population statistics.


Among the findings:


- Mexican death rates are rising even as the U.S. workplace grows safer overall. In the mid-1990s, Mexicans were about 30 percent more likely to die than native-born workers; now they are about 80 percent more likely.


- Deaths among Mexicans in the United States increased faster than their population. As the number of Mexican workers grew by about half, from 4 million to 6 million, the number of deaths rose by about two-thirds, from 241 to 387. Deaths peaked at 420 in 2001.
...snip....

[Maestro]

1. I believe it.

Many of the children I teach have parents that are these same workers. Republicans and companies in general complain about work going away, outsourcing, but they are also the first ones to hire day laborers for almost no money and then put them into unsafe working conditions. They need them as much as the Mexican workers need the job.

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

2. In California a few years back, Repukes tried to make it illegal

for undocumented workers to file a work comp claim...even their fellow repukes held their nose at the notion that a person could be barred from obtaining benefits from a company that breaks the law by hiring them and then gets rewarded when they have an accident.