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LAWRENCE — In his nine years in Lawrence, Simon Ortega has worked at some pretty dangerous jobs.
The 39-year-old Dominican-born laborer says he has had to use toxic chemicals, climb on high roofs, and avoid inhaling potentially lethal dust. He has also seen his share of co-workers get hurt on the job.
‘‘It can be very dangerous,’’ Ortega said in Spanish. ‘‘I haven’t gotten hurt, but you just have to watch yourself and be careful. But not everyone knows how.’’
That, labor specialists say, is especially true for Latino construction workers, who as a group are more likely than any others to experience workplace accidents, including fatalities, according to US labor statistics.
And researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, as well as the city of Lawrence, want to know why.
Last month, UMass-Lowell and a coalition of Lawrence groups announced that they have received a $2.7 million, five-year federal grant to study the health of area Latino construction workers. The grant will also allow the coalition to provide workplace training aimed at Latino laborers to help prevent accidents on the job.
‘‘Over 900 Hispanic workers died on the job last year, 21 of those from falls,’’ said Lenore Azaroff, the lead researcher on the project, citing national statistics. ‘‘What this grant will do is help us look into why this is the case.’’
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 5,703 fatal job-related injuries in 2006, 16 percent of which involved Latino workers. About 21 percent of those who died from falls last year were Latino workers, compared with 13 percent who were white, the statistics show.
Azaroff said that is a high number, because Latinos make up only 12 percent of the workforce. And although the overall fatality rate dropped slightly from 2005, the rate involving Latinos was still disproportionate to their share of the construction job market, Azaroff said.
In Massachusetts, about a quarter of workers fatally injured at work in 2005 were born outside the United States, according to numbers provided by UMass-Lowell, which did not have a breakdown of the data by ethnicity. A total of 78 workers died on the job in 2005 in the Bay State, according to the Massachusetts AFL-CIO.
Azaroff said she believes many of those injuries and deaths could have been avoided through proper training and if contractors were following regulations. She suspects that language barriers and education gaps play a role in the high injury rates among Latino workers.
Azaroff said researchers at the university chose Lawrence as the research and education site because more than 70 percent of the city’s population of 71,000 is Latino and the region has been undergoing a construction boom.
But just how many Latino workers in Lawrence and the Merrimack Valley have been hurt or killed on the job is unknown, said Carlos Matos, the liaison between the Laborers Local 175 union and UMass-Lowell. That’s because the workers and their families may not know their rights or have language barriers and are not reporting their accidents, Matos said.
There is also some uncertainty about how many Latino construction workers are in the area because many of them work on a contract basis and some are undocumented.
‘‘Bottom line — if workers are working in an illegal and unsafe working environment, it doesn’t matter if they are legal or illegal immigrants,’’ Matos said. ‘‘Employers just shouldn’t be’’ allowing those conditions to exist.
The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is funding the grant. According to the agency, falls are the second-leading cause of workplace deaths after motor vehicle crashes. Exposure to silica dust from concrete work is a major cause of lung cancer, pulmonary tuberculosis, and airway disease, the agency said.
UMass and Lawrence officials said they hope that their project, Protección en Construcción: Lawrence Latino Safety Partnership, will become a national model for other cities to tackle the high rate of workplace accidents among Latinos.
Among the goals of the grant’s education outreach will be to hold public forums and personal safety classes with workers and their families. The outreach educators will spend time showing workers how to properly handle silica dust and avoid workplace injuries by following some basic precautionary steps.
Michael Gagliardi, business manager for Laborers Local 175, said the union will help educate any workers regardless of legal status. ‘‘The important thing is to make sure that all construction workers are safe,’’ said Gagliardi. ‘‘When a worker gets hurt, it not only affects the worker but also [the worker’s] family.’’
Ruth Rojas, a community activist in Lawrence, said she believes some employers know their Latino workers probably do not know that they have a right to workers’ compensation or that employers have to follow safety guidelines. For that reason, Rojas said, some Latino workers are in working environments that put them at risk.
The workers ‘‘don’t know that employers are breaking the rules because this may be how things were done in the old country,’’ said Rojas.
One of those tapped to be an outreach coordinator for the project is Doris Anziani, 37, the Lawrence Fire Department’s first Latina firefighter. Anziani said she hopes to recruit three other outreach workers so they can meet one-on-one with area Latino construction workers about their rights.
‘‘Basically, we’re going to go out and talk to construction workers and their families, just in case the workers can’t make the meetings,’’ Anziani said. ‘‘If we don’t do this now, the numbers [of workplace accidents] will continue to rise.’’
For his part, Ortega said that, despite all the risks associated with construction jobs, he still enjoys working on ceilings and roofs for a living. He just wants to make sure he remains healthy.
‘‘Besides,’’ he said, ‘‘if I don’t work, my children don’t eat.’’
Russell Contreras can be reached at rcontreras@globe.com.
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
