© 2004 American Public Health Association
David B. Richardson and Dana Loomis are with the Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. At the time of the study, James Bena was with the Risk Evaluation Branch, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Cincinnati, Ohio. A. John Bailer is with the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, and the Risk Evaluation Branch, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Cincinnati. Correspondence: Requests for reprints should be sent to David Richard-son, Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, CB No. 8050, Bank of America Plaza, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 275998050 (e-mail: david_richardson{at}unc.edu).
Objectives. We investigated fatal occupational injury rates in the United States by race and Hispanic ethnicity during the period 19901996. Methods. Fatalities were identified by means of the national traumatic occupational fatalities surveillance system. Fatal occupational injury rates were calculated by race/ethnicity and region using US-censusbased workforce estimates. Results. Non-Hispanic Black men in the South had the highest fatal occupational injury rate (8.5 per 100000 worker-years), followed by Hispanic men in the South (7.9 per 100000 worker-years). Fatal injury rates for Hispanic men increased over the study period, exceeding rates for non-Hispanic Black men in the latter years of observation. Conclusions. These data suggest a change in the demographics of fatal occupational injuries in the United States. Hispanic men in the South appear to be emerging as the group with the nations highest unintentional fatal occupational injury rate.
The division of labor in the United States is structured by race and ethnicity. Black and immigrant workers historically have been hired disproportionately in labor-intensive jobs involving hazardous and unpleasant working conditions.1,2 In addition to individual acts of discrimination in hiring and work assignment, legal and economic structures have contributed to the racial and ethnic division of labor. Persistent segregation of residential neighborhoods and educational institutions, for example, influences labor market opportunities for minority and immigrant workers. This is particularly true in the southern United States, where state-sanctioned racial segregation persisted in some states until relatively recently and prejudice against minority and immigrant workers has impeded efforts to organize for improvements in working conditions.3 In recent years, the American South has experienced substantial declines in employment in traditional labor-intensive industries such as agriculture and furniture and textile manufacturing.46 Coincident with these declines has been a demographic shift in employment. Increasingly, manual labor (e.g., hand harvesting of row crops), once done primarily by Black workers, is being done by Hispanic workers.7 This pattern is occurring not only in declining industries but also in labor-intensive industries where employment has been increasing in the South, such as construction and landscaping. We examined racial/ethnic differences in fatal occupational injury rates in the South and compared these observations to patterns in the rest of the United States. We began by examining fatal occupational injury rates by race/ethnicity in southern and non-southern states. Next, we examined variation over time in fatal injury rates to investigate whether there is evidence of an increase or decrease over time in disparities in fatal injury rates by race/ethnicity and region. Finally, we investigated whether racial/ ethnic differences in fatal injury rates within each region remained after adjusting for differences in the distribution of workers with respect to occupation and industry.
The US National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health systematically compiles information on occupational injury deaths as part of the national traumatic occupational fatalities (NTOF) surveillance system. The NTOF database includes death certificate information from the 50 states, New York City, and the District of Columbia for all deaths of persons aged 16 years or older for whom an external cause of death (International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision8 codes E800E999) was noted and for whom the certifier entered a positive response to the "Injury at work?" item.9,10 The analyses reported in this article include only unintentional injury deaths, which excludes deaths in the workplace from homicide, suicide, medical misadventure, nonwork-related choking on food or other objects, and nonoccupational poisoning by therapeutic drugs or alcohol. All decedents included in these analyses were required to have complete information on date of birth, date of death, gender, race, usual occupation and industry of employment, and place of residence. A joint race/ethnicity variable was defined with 3 categories: Hispanic, Black, and non-Black. Any worker with an indication of Hispanic ethnicity, regardless of race, was included in the Hispanic category. We used the term Hispanic, rather than an alternative such as Latino, because the source data for these analyses were compiled using this terminology. Non-Hispanic workers of Black race made up the Black category. Non-Hispanic workers of other or unknown race made up the non-Black category, which is composed primarily of decedents of European descent (97%), with small percentages of decedents of Asian (2%), Pacific Islander (< 1%), and Native American descent (< 1%). Information describing the decedents race and ethnic origin is collected by the person completing the demographic portion of the death certificate (typically the funeral director) from next of kin or other informants. The 1989 revision of the US standard certificate of death incorporated a significant change with the inclusion of a specific item on Hispanic ethnicity; a decedent is classified as Hispanic if the certifier enters a positive response to the "was decedent of Hispanic origin?" item.11,12 Almost all registration areas had implemented revised forms by the recommended date of January 1, 1989, with most state certificates closely following the model of the US standard certificate of death.11,12 The analyses reported in this article were conducted as part of a larger project examining fatal occupational injuries in the United States over the period 19801996.13 However, because a separate variable indicating Hispanic ethnicity was not recorded in the NTOF database before 1990, these analyses were restricted to the 7-year period 19901996. Information on Hispanic ethnicity was missing/unknown for a small percentage of decedents (< 1%); these decedents were classified as non-Hispanic. All eligible deaths in the NTOF system were tabulated by calendar year, gender, race/ ethnicity, occupation, industry, and geographic region of the United States (South vs non-South). The South was defined for these analyses according to the conventional US census regions and includes Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, District of Columbia, Maryland, and Delaware. We estimated the size of the workforce at risk using the 1980 and 1990 census data (the necessary data from the 2000 census were not available at the time this article was written). The work-force sizes for the years 19911996 were estimated by linear extrapolation.
Rates of fatal occupational injury were estimated for each year as the count of injury deaths divided by the estimated number of workers employed in that year, which approximates worker-years at risk. Poisson regression analyses, conducted with SAS PROC GENMOD, were used to estimate trends in fatal occupational injury rates over time, under the model
The value
These analyses included 26828 deaths from unintentional injury on the job. Table 1
Outside the South, fatal injury rates were highest for non-Black workers (5.1 per 100000 worker-years), intermediate for Hispanic workers (4.3 per 100000 worker-years), and lowest for Black workers (4.0 per 100000 worker-years). Notably, Black men working in the South had a fatal occupational injury rate that was more than two times the rate for Black men working in the non-South. Female workers had much lower fatal injury rates than male workers, with minimal evidence of difference in rates between race/ ethnicity groups within each region. In the South, non-Hispanic women (Black and non-Black) had slightly higher fatal injury rates (0.4 per 100 000 worker-years) than His-panic women; in other regions, non-Black female workers had a slightly higher fatal injury rate (0.3 per 100 000 worker-years) than other female workers.
Overall, unintentional fatal occupational injury rates in the United States declined 1.1% per year (95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.7, 0.5) during the period 19901996. However, estimates of the annual change in fatal injury rates differed markedly by race/ethnicity and region (Table 2
Estimates of the average annual change in fatal injury rates may obscure nonlinear trends in rates. In the South, fatal injury rates for non-Black men declined gradually over the study period (Figure 1
These analyses of fatal occupational injury rates do not account for differences in employment structure between race/ethnicity and regional groups. To investigate whether observed differences in fatal injury rates by race/ethnicity and region owed to differences in employment structure, we standardized rates to a referent population (the gender-specific employment distribution of non-Black workers in non-southern states, 1990).
After we adjusted for differences in employment structure, annual fatal occupational injury rates for non-Black male workers in the South were still higher than fatal injury rates for non-Black male workers in non-southern states (available from the authors at: http://www.unc.edu/~davidr/trends). Adjusted fatal injury rates for Black men in the South were slightly higher than fatal injury rates for non-Black men in the South in some, but not all, years. This suggests that the higher fatal injury rates observed for Black workers in the South compared with non-Black workers in the South (Table 1
Examination of industry-specific trends, although less precise than overall trends, helps describe the direction of trends within major industrial categories. Because of the small number of deaths for some groups when we stratified by race, region, and industry, we focused on trends in major industrial categories in which at least 1 death occurred in each year for each race/ethnicity in each region. Among Hispanic men, trends in fatal injury rates were positive, indicating fatal injury rates that increased with time, for workers employed in every major industry group in southern and non-southern states (Figure 2
We also examined occupation-specific trends in fatal occupational injury rates (available from the authors at: http://www.unc.edu/~davidr/trends). Among Hispanic men, trends in fatal injury rates were positive for laborers and those employed in farming/forestry/fishing, crafts, transportation, and service occupations in both the South and the non-South. Trends were also positive among Hispanic men for machine operator occupations in the non-South. Trends were significantly positive for His-panic men employed in service, transportation, and laborer occupations in the non-South, and craft and laborer occupations in the South. Among non-Black men, negative trends in fatal injury rates were observed for most occupationswith the exception of machine operatorsin the South and non-South and for transportation workers in the South. Among Black men, positive trends were observed for service occupations and laborers in the South, whereas trends were negative for other occupations.
It has been reported previously that fatal occupational injury rates for Black men in the United States are higher than fatal occupational injury rates for non-Black men.10,13 As shown in Table 1
Fatal occupational injury rates for Hispanic men were between rates for non-Hispanic Black and non-Black men (Table 1
A major focus of these analyses was on trends in fatal injury rates over time. Fatal occupational injury rates in the United States have declined for several decades.13,19 However, we observed that the direction of trends in fatal injury rates differed for Hispanic and non-Hispanic men (Table 2 Undercounting of Hispanics by official census records does not per se lead to spurious trends in fatal injury rates over time; in order for a spurious positive trend in rates to occur, the degree of undercounting of Hispanics must increase over time. We estimated annual employment levels by linear extrapolation from decennial census data, an approach shown previously to be appropriate for fatal injury trend analyses.20 Furthermore, observations from other investigations of trends in US fatal occupational injury rates among Hispanic men support our conclusions. Using information on fatality counts obtained from the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries21 and annual rate denominator data derived from annual summaries of the monthly Current Population Survey, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported that fatal injury rates for non-Hispanic workers have declined over time, whereas rates for Hispanic workers have not. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported that fatal injury rates for Hispanic male workers in the United States have exceeded the fatal injury rates for non-Hispanic workers in recent years.2225 In 2001, for example, Hispanic workers had a higher rate of fatal injury (6.0 per 100 000 worker-years) than non-Hispanic White workers (4.2 per 100 000 worker-years) and Black workers (3.8 per 100 000 worker-years).24,25 In order for undercounting of Hispanic workers to lead to positive bias in these reports of trends in fatal injury rates, one would have to postulate that Current Population Survey data have suffered progressively greater undercounting of Hispanic workers over time.
Possible explanations for why Hispanic ethnicity may be a determinant of fatal injuries include communication barriers on the job and during training; the assignment of more hazardous tasks to Hispanic workers rather than to non-Hispanic workers who ostensibly hold the same job; and failure by employers to invest in safety training, equipment, and protective gear for jobs done by Hispanic workers who may be short-term or illegal employees. Dong and Platner proposed similar explanations for their observation that Hispanic construction workers in the United States were at significantly greater risk of fatal occupational injury during the period 19922000 than their non-Hispanic counterparts.26 Their study, which was based on Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries and Current Population Survey data, found that this pattern was consistent in each year of observation, with minimal variation over calendar time in fatal injury rates for either ethnic group.26 In our study, although fatal occupational injury rates for Hispanic men tended to increase over time (Table 2
We observed that fatal injury rates for southern workers were higher than fatal injury rates for non-southern workers within each category of gender and race/ethnicity (Table 1
This research was partially supported by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (grant R01-OH03910).
Human Participant Protection
Contributors D. B. Richardson and D. Loomis contributed to all aspects of this study including conception and design, analysis and interpretation of the data, and drafting of this article. J. Bena and A. J. Bailer contributed to the analysis and interpretation of the data and the drafting of this article Accepted for publication March 17, 2004.
1. Taylor AK, Murray LR. Minority workers. In: Levy BA, Wegman DH, eds. Occupational Health: Recognizing and Preventing Work-Related Disease and Injury. Philadelphia, Pa: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins; 2000: 679687. 2. Lloyd JW. Long-term mortality study of steelworkers, V: Respiratory cancer in coke plant workers. J Occup Environ Med. 1971;13(2):5368. 3. Griffith BS. The Crisis of American Labor: Operation Dixie and the Defeat of the CIO. Philadelphia, Pa: Temple University Press; 1988.
4. Richardson D, Loomis D. Trends in fatal occupational injuries and industrial restructuring in North Carolina in the 1980s. Am J Public Health. 1997;87:10411043. 5. Eckman A, Green J. Dislocation and Workforce Equity; The South at Work in the 1990s. Durham, NC: Institute for Southern Studies; 1997. 6. Mishel L, Bernstein J. The State of Working America, 19941995. Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe Inc; 1994. 7. Swanson LL. Racial/Ethnic Minorities in Rural Areas: Progress and Stagnation. Washington, DC: US Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service; 1996. 8. International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization, 1980.
9. Stout N, Jenkins E, Pizatella T. Occupational injury mortality rates in the United States: changes from 1980 to 1989. Am J Public Health. 1996;86:7377. 10. Marsh S, Layne L. Fatal Injuries to Civilian Workers in the United States, 19801995. Cincinnati, Ohio: Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health; 2001. Report 2001129. 11. Tolson G, Barnes J, Gay G, Kowaleski J. The 1989 revision of the US standard certificates and reports. Vital Health Stat 4. 1991;28:134. 12. Rosenberg HM, Maurer JD, Sorlie PD, et al. Quality of death rates by race and Hispanic origin: a summary of current research, 1999. Vital Health Stat 2. 1999;128:113.
13. Loomis D, Bena JF, Bailer AJ. Diversity of trends in occupational injury mortality in the United States, 198096. Inj Prev. 2003;9(1):914. 14. Frome EL. The analysis of rates using Poisson regression models. Biometrics. 1983;39:665674.[Web of Science][Medline] 15. SAS, Version 8.01 [computer program]. Cary, NC: SAS Institute; 1999.
16. Loomis D, Richardson D. Race and the risk of fatal injury at work. Am J Public Health. 1998;88:4044. 17. Census of Population and Housing, 1990. Washington DC: US Bureau of the Census; 1992. 18. Current Population Survey microdata files, Employment and Earnings. Washington DC: US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics; 1990.
19. Bailer AJ, Stayner LT, Stout NA, Reed LD, Gilbert SJ. Trends in rates of occupational fatal injuries in the United States (198392). Occup Environ Med. 1998; 55:485489. 20. Bena JF, Richardson D, Bailer AJ, Loomis D, Marshall S. Comparison of fatality rate denominator choices: population based methods. Paper presented at: the Third National Occupational Injury Research Symposium (NOIRS); October, 2003; Pittsburgh, Pa. 21. Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, 19922001. Washington DC: US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. 22. Toscano G, Windau J. The changing character of fatal work injuries. Mon Labor Rev. October 1994:1728. 23. Toscano G, Windau J. National Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, 1995. Compensation Working Conditions. September 1996:3445. 24. National Census of Fatal Injuries in 2001. Washington DC: Bureau of Labor Statistics US Department of Labor; 2002. Report USDL 02541. 25. Walters F. Crunching the numbers: OSHAs data collection program is helping the agency focus its resources where the need is greatest. JSHQ: Job Safety Health Q. 2003;14(2):12. 26. Dong X, Platner JW. Occupational fatalities of Hispanic construction workers from 1992 to 2000. Am J Ind Med. 2004;45(1):4554.[Medline] 27. New Residential ConstructionHistory Tables: Housing Units Authorized by Building Permits. Washington DC: Bureau of the Census; 2001. This article has been cited by other articles:
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||