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October 2005, Vol. 128, No. 10
Fatal occupational injuries among Asian workers
Jessica R. Sincavage
According to Census 2000, Asian-Americans accounted for 3.6 percent of the U.S. population; this percentage is likely to rise as more Asians continue to immigrate. In 2000, 76 percent of the foreign-born Asian population had immigrated to the United States in the past two decades.1 Part of this increase was because of the growth of the foreign-born Asian population from 1990 to 2000. In 2000, 43 percent of the foreign-born Asian population had just immigrated into the United States within the past 10 years.
As the Asian-American population continues to grow, so does the need to understand the distinct societal and economic issues this group faces, especially in the workplace. Worker safety is one area that can be studied. Understanding the dangers that threaten their safety in the workplace and how the Asian labor force experience differs from other workers is an important beginning.
This article examines trends in fatal work injuries to Asian workers. Data are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI) and the Current Population Survey (CPS). CPS employment data for Asians as a distinct group is only available since 2000; data for prior years reflect Asians and Pacific Islanders together. The President’s Office of Management and Budget defines "Asian" as "A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam."2
The Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries recorded 775 fatal work injuries to Asian workers over the 1999–2003 period.3 These fatal work injuries represent 3 percent of the total fatal workplace injuries occurring over those 5 years. (See table 1.)
This excerpt is from an article published in the October 2005 issue of the Monthly Labor Review. The full text of the article is available in Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF). See How to view a PDF file for more information.
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Footnotes
1
See We the People: Asians in the United States, Census 2000
Special Reports (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000) on the Internet at http://www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/censr-17.pdf.
2 See www.whitehouse.gov/omb/fedreg/1997standards.html for more information.
3 See http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshcfoi1.htm for more information.
Injuries, Illnesses, and
Fatalities
Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey
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