9.4.3: Workplace Health

Factors Influencing Workplace Health

The impacts of external factors on health also deeply influence community health in the context of workplaces. Chicanx and Latinx people are over-represented in industries that include a high risk of workplace exposure to toxic chemicals, such as agriculture, gardening, cleaning, construction, and food service. Vulnerability to this exposure is made worse by language barriers and exploitation of legal and immigration status. Required safety procedures, training, and materials are often provided in English and not translated or interpreted into other languages. Further, even when the dangers of poor working conditions are well known and understood, employers may refuse to provide proper safety equipment or adjust the workplace setting and instead threaten the workers’ legal status to coerce compliance. You can review more about the advocacy around workers’ rights and health in Chapter 7: Social Movement Activity.

COVID-19 and Chicanx and Latinx Workers’ Health

During the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the topic of workers’ health and safety became a question of national discussion and policymaking. Employers and politicians constructed the category of essential work to describe the people whose jobs contribute directly to the daily basic functioning of society, most of whom would be categorized as low-income and working-class workers, including agricultural workers, retail clerks in grocery stores, pharmacies, and supply stores, and maintenance workers. These individuals were asked to continue to work and expose themselves to a potentially lethal disease in order to ensure the ongoing comfort and stability of society as a whole. The image in Figure 9.4.1 shows the representation of Black and Brown workers in retail, farmwork, logistics, sanitation, and office work who were deemed “essential” and continued working during the most dangerous parts of the pandemic. The image includes the words, “My heart overflows with gratitude for the workers giving us life.”

Figure 9.4.1: "Solidarity with Essential Workers" by Melanie Cervantes, Justseeds is licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Corporations sought to frame these workers as “heroes” in order to place a symbolic value on this sacrifice without providing any policy or economic redress. However, labor unions, workers’ organizations, and liberal politicians advocated for employers to be required to provide safety equipment, paid sick time, and protections for workers who exercised their rights. However, despite these efforts, Chicanx and Latinx communities were still disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 infection rates. Migrant communities, who were already more likely to be exposed to chemicals and working conditions that deteriorate respiratory health, were put into the position of risking infection and their own health and that of their families to continue feeding the world. In Figure 9.4.2, an activist artist has crafted an image of recognition and gratitude, with a Latina farmworker carrying a box of tomatoes surrounded by palm fronds and the words “Migrant Womxn Feed the World” written across the produce box. 

Figure 9.4.2: "Migrant Women Feed the World" by Gabriela Aleman, Justseeds is licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

The COVID-19 pandemic also reflected many recurring and long-term barriers to healthcare, including a lack of healthcare providers in Chicanx and Latinx communities, skepticism of physicians, and the exclusion of immigrants and non-English speakers from health resources.⁵⁰ This has led to not only higher rates of COVID-19 infection among Chicanx and Latinx communities but also increased risk of hospitalization, serious symptoms, and death. Even after the virus has been declared endemic by the CDC, these overall barriers have continued to disparately impact Chicanx and Latinx communities, who are more likely to live and work in densely populated environments and be subjected to continuous controls like mandated mask-wearing in retail, food service, cleaning, and healthcare settings.

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Summary

The health and well-being of Chicanx and Latinx communities are influenced by many factors. Throughout this chapter, we learned about and analyzed aspects of traditional health and healing that have been degraded by generations of settler-colonial structures and the enforcement of western medicine. These larger structures have influenced health disparities for Chicanx and Latinx communities, including individual-level indicators like physical health and mental health. Institutional healthcare has failed to address the wellbeing of Chicanx and Latinx communities, ranging from direct violence at the hands of medical practitioners to exclusions in health policy and bias and discrimination in the delivery of healthcare. 

Yet, communities, healthcare providers, and activists have continued to sustain traditional practices of health and healing for the present and future generations. This work addresses the disparities and gaps created in the dominant western medical system, and creates opportunities for collaboration to invest in holistic health, community wellbeing and healthcare for all. With a sustained effort grounded in education, families, and creating spaces of belonging, we heal from the physical, mental and spiritual struggles of the body, mind, and spirit.

Ancillary materials for this chapter are located in Section 11.9: Chapter 9 Resource Guide, which includes slides, media, writing and discussion prompts, and suggested assignments and activities. 

Key Terms

Institutional health care: Health care provided by hospitals and with doctors, physicians, prescribed medications, surgical procedures, and psychiatric appointments, which typically involve insurance. 

Traditional health care: Indigenous ways of health and healing of cuerpo y alma (body and soul) mediated through curanderas/os (healers) or other specialists, like parteras (midwifes) and involves remedios (medicinal herbs), ceremonies, limpias (spiritual cleansings), sobaradoras/os sobadas (massage therapist or massage), huezera/o (bone setter), informal counseling for bilis (rage), susto (fright), or envido (envy), and ancestral foodways.

Acculturation: The process over time of adapting to and adopting cultural practices of a new environment, which can include both individual change and community and cultural change.  

Latino Health Paradox: The pattern of immigrant Mexican and Latinx people report better health and longer life expectancy compared to their acculturated Mexican origin and Latinx counterparts and European Americans of higher class statuses. 

Promotoras: Health workers who have received specialized training to provide basic health education in the community, who have been key mediators for Chicanx and Latinx communities to gain health access. 

287(g) agreements: Policies that permit the cooperation of federal immigration authorities with local police and have increased the use of invasive and violent strategies in deportation and other immigration enforcement activities. 

Structural vulnerability: Someone’s status in society’s multiple overlapping and mutually reinforcing power hierarchies. 

Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA): Law that made permanent residents are ineligible for public assistance during their first five years in the U.S.

Public charge rule: A policy based on the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) § 212(a)(4), which states that individuals are inadmissible to the U.S. if they are “likely at any time to become a public charge”, and discouraged noncitizens from pursuing needed benefits prior to regulating their status 

Act 22: Law that allows individuals to operate in Puerto Rico without paying any capital gains taxes, which encourages predatory capitalism that has left the island in a constant cycle of exploitation. 

Environmental justice: Addressing environmental concerns in conjunction with other aspects of exploitation and oppression, including white supremacy, capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy, and settler-colonialism.

Essential work: A phrase that describes people whose jobs contribute directly to the daily basic functioning of society, most of whom would be categorized as low-income and working-class workers, including agricultural workers, retail clerks in grocery stores, pharmacies, and supply stores, and maintenance workers.

COVID-19: A pandemic that reflects many recurring and long-term barriers to healthcare, including a lack of healthcare providers in Chicanx and Latinx communities, skepticism of physicians, and the exclusion of immigrants and non-English speakers from health resources.

 

Footnote

⁵⁰ Mario Alberto Viveros Espinoza-Kulick, “Movement Pandemic Adaptability: Health Inequity and Advocacy among Latinx Immigrant and Indigenous Peoples,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 19, no. 15 (2022): 8981.