VALES+T: Targeting Psychosocial Stressors to Reduce Latino Day Laborers Injury Disparities Even as the safety of US workers continues to improve overall, the safety of Latino workers, especially day laborers, continues to deteriorate. Latino day laborers (LDL) are predominantly Spanish monolingual immigrant workers who experience multiple psychosocial stressors, including situational and immigration stress that amplify their risk for injury at work. LDL look for work at informal hiring sites or ?corners? where they get hired intermittently to do a variety of entry-level jobs whose shifting conditions expose them to multiple safety hazards. The most alarming consequence of this constant rotation across unpredictable, dangerous jobs is the high rate of job-related fatalities in this population. Despite the urgent need, there are no effective and rigorously tested safety programs, portable to the corner where LDL wait for work, to help them cope with stressors that increase their risk for workplace injury. Our project's main goal is to address this question: Can a corner-based safety program addressing the psycho social stressors confronted by LDL reduce their reported exposure to hazardous conditions at work? Our proposed project, VALES+T (You are worth/worthy of more) is a 5 year community-based participatory program developed in partnership with Latino day laborers whose pilot results provide evidence of increasing risk reduction practices and reducing hazardous exposures at work. We are proposing to implement a multilevel intervention delivered in Spanish by LDL promotores to their peers at the corners and to test the program's effectiveness in a cluster randomized trial. The central aims of the project are: (1) to determine the efficacy of VALES+T in reducing hazardous exposures at work, and (2) to determine the mediating effect of psychosocial stressors on the primary outcomes of VALES+T. All project activities will be done in collaboration with our community partner, the Fe y Justicia (Faith and Justice) Worker Center, and with guidance from our Community Advisory Board . The short-term goal of VALES+T is to reduce LDL workplace hazards by involving them in a corner-based safety program that effectively addresses seldom targeted situational and immigration stress that increase risky practices at work. Our long-term goal is to reduce the high injury rates among Latino day laborers. Mitigating safety risks among LDL is an urgent public health priority that can be addressed by taking effective, low-cost, preventive action.
The purpose of the Vales+T study is to implement and evaluate an injury prevention program among Latino day laborers (LDL) in Houston who are at a high risk of experiencing an injury at work. Our main objective is to answer this question: Can a corner-based safety program addressing the psychosocial stressors confronted by LDL reduce their exposure to hazardous conditions at work? In partnership with our Community Advisory Board, we will answer this question by testing the efficacy of the program in a group randomized trial to be conducted at local day labor corners. Our short term goal is to determine if we can reduce hazardous work exposures and our long term goal is to reduce LDL injuries at work. If successful we would like to adapt this program for dissemination at the local and national levels among interested organizations.
