Title: Chair's Message, Fall 2006
Author:
Section/SPIG: Occupational Health and Safety
Issue Date:
Rachel Rubin, MD, MPH
Division Chair, Occupational Medicine
Stroger Hospital of Cook County and Rush Medical College
Assistant Professor, University of Illinois School of Public Health
rrubin@uic.edu, (312) 864-5520
In the wake of the largest demonstrations possibly in U.S. history around a single issue that brought out millions of people to support immigrants’ rights, we have a tremendous opportunity for advancing advocacy on behalf of workers’ rights. Most workers in the United States are descendents of immigrants to this country. Historically, the foundation of our work force is based on the labor of immigrants. It was invigorating and energizing to be part of one of the largest immigrants’ rallies and marches in Chicago, and being able to look around and see neighbors, colleagues, friends, and a vast sea of strangers that were all brought together in face of the discriminatory policy towards immigrants and immigrant workers in this country. We had all come together to make our voices heard about various issues related to immigration in this country.
The exploitation of the current immigrant work force is quite profound and is demonstrated in our daily lives as health and safety experts and activists. We need to capitalize on the momentum of these mass demonstrations and diverse coalitions of various organizations, which have a variety of interests and agendas, but have a commonality of supporting the rights of immigrants to live, work and prosper in this country without the fear of deportations, imprisonments, or reprisals from employers and immigration officials.
In January, Abel Valenzuela and Nik Theodore, et al., released a report about the situation of day laborers in this country, where over 90 percent of these day laborers are immigrants (www.sscnet.ucla.edu/issr/csup/index.php). The day laborer population is especially vulnerable to unsafe workplaces, not receiving appropriate training for the tasks that they are hired to do, workplace harassment and wage and hour violations by not receiving full pay, overtime pay, and regularly not being paid at all after the work is completed. Many recent immigrants are put in the position of looking for any job they can find and taking whatever wage and working conditions come with the job without any recourse for improving the conditions of their work. However, this growing movement around immigrant rights is a wonderful opportunity for health and safety advocates including academics, unions, community-based organizations, and other non-governmental as well as public institutions to capitalize on the momentum, and fight not only for a living wage for all workers but to fight for safe working conditions and health care for all workers.
Now that I have let off steam, I would like to go on to some other issues related to our work within APHA. I am happy to announce that APHA has signed on to the INMEX (Informed Meeting Exchange Program) organized by UNITE/HERE!. Upon request of our section and in keeping with past resolutions passed by the Governing Council, Dr. Benjamin has agreed to sign on to this campaign on behalf of APHA. INMEX is a program designed to provide information to organizations that have large meetings in various venues throughout the United States about “labor friendly” hotel and convention centers. They are trying to have various professional, non-profit, trade and other organizations, including APHA, sign on to the program so that they can make informed decisions about where their conferences and conventions will be held. Hopefully, they will choose to hold their meetings in hotels and convention centers that provide a living wage, that are not involved in labor disputes, and that are concerned about the health and safety of their workers.
I want to give a big thanks to our Section Counselors, including Tobi Lippin, Kerry Souza, Walter Alarcon, Butch de Castro, Peter Dooley, and Luis Vasquez, for their tremendous collective effort in composing a letter on behalf of the Section to the Director of NIOSH, John Howard, MD, MPH, about the newly proposed NORA II program. The letter was sent to Dr. Howard and NIOSH staff as part of the series of town hall meetings and requests for comments on the new NORA II research agenda. In spite of a diversity of opinions about the proposed NORA II plan, the Section Counselors put together a set of recommendations and comments that reflect the Section’s common concerns and appropriateness of the proposed program. We also have awardees for our upcoming APHA Annual Meeting, and the awards will be presented at our Awards Luncheon. The Alice Hamilton Award will go to our very own Darryl Alexander from the American Federation of Teachers. The Lorin Kerr Award will go to Richard Miller from the Government Accountability Project. Our newest award, the Tony Mazzocchi Award, will go to Tony Carr, the health and safety chair of USW Local Union 998, and I am most pleased to announce that our International Award is going to Dr. Metoda Dodic-Fikfak, who is one of the leading occupational physicians in Slovenia. She is director of their national government’s research center on occupation and health, and hopefully will be able to join us in Boston to receive her award.
Kudos to Butch De Castro, our program chair. The program looks amazing. We are going to have a very exciting agenda, and look to our Web site(http://staff.washington.edu/oshalert/) and the APHA Web site(http://www.apha.org/meetings) for the list and description of sessions and events. We are still developing a late breaker session on occupational history topics that Leslie Nickels is organizing. There will be several sessions at the conference related to war and human rights with respect to occupational health and safety. One is being sponsored by the Labor Caucus, and the other is being co-organized by Barry Levy and Vic Sidel. Our Section will be co-sponsoring and supporting these sessions as they will both address areas of occupational health and safety. A big thanks goes to Barry Levy, who has donated the royalties from the latest edition of his occupational health textbook to the Section for our scholarship funds. Lastly, the Annual Meeting plans for our Awards Luncheon and Tuesday evening party are well under way under the guidance of Elise Pechter, Kerry Souza and other Boston colleagues. I invite everyone to attend the APHA Annual Meeting. We are going to have a strong program and a lively set of events.
As my year as Section Chair comes to a close, I want to express my gratitude and pleasure in working with such a great group of active Section members and leaders. Celeste Monforton organized our conference calls and correspondence, Paul Landsbergis has put together a great set of membership recruitment materials, Mary Miller has continued as our Webmaster, Action Board representative and always keeps us on our toes. Butch deCastro has put together a great scientific program for the Annual Meeting, Peter Dooley is organizing a fantastic Awards Luncheon program, Karen Mulloy has organized the Jim Keogh Scholarship, and the Section Counselors and other leadership have all pitched in this year on a variety of initiatives. Thanks, as always, to Ingrid Denis for putting together the newsletters. See you in Boston!