Immigrants make up a majority of the workers on US dairy farms. Every day, they toil in one of the most dangerous industries in the country. They work with hundreds of animals weighing 1,500 pounds each and deal with all kinds of farm equipment and machinery -- but do they have the training to keep themselves safe?
“The majority of the workers that we trained… had no previous health and safety training,” said Amy K. Liebman, MCN’s Director of Environmental and Occupational Health, in a new video released by Upper Midwest Agricultural Safety and Health Center (UMASH) on our solution to the safety issue: Seguridad en las lecherías, the award-winning health and safety intervention for immigrant workers in dairy created by MCN, UMASH, and the National Farm Medicine Center (NFMC).
The video highlights the need for health and safety resources including a bilingual curriculum, and the unique approach the project takes. By training an employee as a community health worker (CHW), we assure that dairy workers have a trusted and understanding peer who can explain health and safety needs in a culturally and linguistically sensitive way.
“It empowered people in the trenches to have resources to bring to their team members more on a regular basis,” noted Brian Forrest, whose Maple Ridge Dairy successfully implemented the curriculum. Forrest finds the empowerment of the workers themselves is an essential aspect to ensuring all the workers are safe: “They’re there -- I’m away in an office.”
The curriculum is available for free to download [2] on MCN’s website. MCN is committed to offering such resources free of charge for the communities that need it. MCN’s newest comic book resource, focused on zoonotic disease, is available free of charge -- check it out here [3], and order your in-print copies in Spanish here [4].
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