Cultural differences, deportation fears affect reporting of workers' compensation cases among Latinos
Found an interesting article on the Hispanic Trending, Latino Marketing & Advertising Blog on the key to understanding the Latino worker to improve communication and productivity at work.
Although a diverse group, Latino culture shares a lot of the same values including unquestioning respect and deference to authority figures such as work supervisors, foremen, business owners and they like, and they won’t disagree or question a person in authority. Latinos, generally, trust mostly family, extended family members and other Latinos and are likely to not trust employers, especially if they are non-Latino. They don’t want to rock the boat and many fear deportation so the potential for underreporting safety issues, injuries and other problems at the workplace is huge.
Distressingly, the blog also reports that fatalities among Latinos have increased 67 percent between 1992 and 2001. Even worse, these grim statistics may underestimate the problem because of underreporting when illegal immigrants are involved.
Indeed, cultural differences and fears of deportation are likely keeping many Latinos from reporting injuries that happen on the job and claiming workers’ compensation benefits that are due them.
I think it’s important to once again emphasize that under the law undocumented workers are entitled to the same benefits if they are injured or killed on the job.
For the full story:
HispanicTrending - http://juantornoe.blogs.com/hispanictrending/