NIOSH: Puerto Rico townhall meeting transcript - Centers for ...

occupational accident. What happens is if we
call it occupational accident, as good health
people that we are, we know that we have
nothing to do to resolve this.
During my investigation in the documents
that are presented of the statistics of the
Department of Labor one finds the utilization
of the word ‘accident’ and also the word
‘incident’. And I believe that an important
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effort from this group of interested persons in
this field would be to give the proper name to
this. They are not accidents, they are acts of
negligence. And when we name them correctly,
we adjudicate responsibility.
And my preoccupation as to the alleged
events that occur in this manner in the
construction industry has to do with the fact
that many of these employees are immigrants and
on occasion they are illegal, so that we only
see when an incident has occurred of this
magnitud when the worker dies. But there are
many events that we know of that do not
register statistics by the fact that we are
speaking of illegal workers where they are told