Research reveals migrants face elevated risks in Australian workplaces
Those who migrate to Australia are more vulnerable to workplace hazards compared with Australian-born workers, a research team from Curtin University with funding from the Australian Research Council has revealed. An extant scholarship into the working conditions of around 200 million migrants internationally has revealed safety concerns for migrants working in a number of industrialised countries — the US, Canada and Spain included. But according to Curtin University, no such study into the workplace safety of migrants to Australia existed prior to this study, which constituted “significant oversight given the number of migrants working in Australia”.
“Australia is a nation of migrants,” lead researcher and epidemiology and biostatistics expert Associate Professor Alison Reid said. “Foreign-born workers make up 35% of the current workforce.” Reid also notes that globally “the majority of migrant workers do the 3Cs — cooking, caring and cleaning — and 3Ds — dirty, dangerous and demeaning — jobs” and that for the study it was “decided to explore the exposure of migrants to two types of workplace hazard in particular — carcinogens and psychosocial factors”. Workplace carcinogens that migrant workers commonly face include environmental tobacco smoke and diesel engine exhaust, while some psychosocial hazards include bullying, job strain, racism, precarious work and underemployment.
For the study, Reid and her team conducted three national surveys across a number of languages that were designed to assess variations in exposure to carcinogens and psychosocial factors among both foreign- and Australian-born workers. Australian-born workers of Caucasian ancestry were recruited along with workers with Arabic-, Chinese- and Vietnamese-speaking backgrounds as well as workers born in India, New Zealand and the Philippines. The results confirmed significant differences in exposure levels across the groups surveyed. “We found workers from Arabic-speaking backgrounds were 22% more likely to be exposed to diesel engine exhaust than Australian-born workers in the same occupation,” Reid said.
“This suggests the former are given the more hazardous tasks. In addition, we found that 40% of workers who completed the interview in a language other than English were exposed to carcinogens, compared to 29% of English speakers.” Regarding psychosocial hazards, all groups reported exposure, with workers from China reporting low levels of autonomy while workers from India, New Zealand and the Philippines cited low job security. Filipino workers were also found to be more likely to work as labourers, despite more than half having completed a tertiary qualification. Reid and her team also examined fatalities and workplace-injury hospital admissions to determine what impact, if any, country of birth had on these figures.
Surprisingly, it was revealed: “In contrast to many other countries, we found that Australian-born workers are more likely to die from a work-related injury than workers from other countries,” Reid said. “The only exception was men and women from New Zealand who are more likely to be killed from a work-related incident than Australian-born workers.” The research also found that workers from Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom were more likely to die from malignant mesothelioma compared with Australian-born workers.
“Workers from these countries most likely came to Australia as part of an Assisted Passage Scheme,” Reid said. “They would have been placed in government-sponsored employment to build Australia’s infrastructure. These workers had to stay in these jobs, for a minimum period of two years, in order to migrate permanently to Australia.” This research also identified a number of influencing factors in the vulnerability of migrant workers to hazards, which include migrant’s education, English language proficiency and skillset, as well as the migration process itself.
