Community-Engaged Environmental Justice Research at University of Massachusetts Lowell

Several US universities have initiated community-engaged environmental justice research in the community and the workplace.¹ I focus here on projects implemented by the University of Massachusetts Lowell (UML) since the mid-1990s. The pioneer settlement fund Work Environment Justice Fund (WEJF) built on efforts to address immigrant communities' exposures to hazardous chemicals in Massachusetts. After the WEJF university faculty and staff engaged in community-based partnerships with Southeast Asian, Brazilian, and Hispanic communities in the Merrimack Valley and the Boston Metro area.² Brief descriptions of a few of these will illustrate the university's commitment to improving the work environment conditions of immigrant populations in the state.

A PIONEERING BEGINNING

In the early 1990s, state enforcement actions against a smelting firm in Somerville, Massachusetts, for environmental pollution violations created conditions for a partnership between the state and community groups. This partnership led to the creation of a settlement fund to redress harm called The Work Environment Justice Fund. Long-term faculty engagement with community and labor organizations to advance workers' health and safety led to the Attorney General's office awarding management of the WEJF to UML. Between 1994 and 1998, the WEJF supported fifty-five community-based small projects in Massachusetts to promote prevention of occupational disease and injury, engage workers in organizing campaigns on health and safety issues, provide advocacy services for workers faced with health and safety problems, and publicize occupational hazards and efforts to correct them. The WEJF pioneered a variety of community-based environmental justice research and action projects targeting Latino and Asian immigrant populations in Massachusetts.³

Two of these community-based environmental justice projects led by UML researchers between 2003 and 2008 are described herein. They were funded by the joint National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)–National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Environmental Justice (NIEHS): Partnerships for Communication program.⁴

PROJECT COBWEB

Project COBWEB (Collaboration for Better Work Environment for Brazilians in Massachusetts) was a partnership among UML; the Brazilian Immigrant Center (BIC), a worker center for Brazilians in Massachusetts; the Lowell Community Health Center, a primary health care provider; and the Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health (MassCOSH), a nonprofit membership coalition of labor and community organizations and occupational safety and health professionals. The project identified work environment hazards, profiled the working conditions of Brazilian immigrants, and promoted workplace health-condition improvements of Brazilian immigrants in Massachusetts.

Through activities ranging from collecting primary and secondary injury and fatality data for Brazilian immigrant workers to the production of a video about immigration, Project COBWEB educated and engaged housecleaning and construction workers, especially roofers and painters,⁵ and provided outreach services to hundreds of Brazilian construction and housecleaning workers. These included delivery of information and training on workplace hazards, followed by discussion about development of viable solutions to health problems generated by exposures to such hazards. Successful outreach relied on priests and pastors from catholic and evangelical Brazilian churches who became essential community partners.

Local and regional ethnic newspapers carried dozens of articles and columns in Portuguese written by BIC and UML staff about workplace injuries and fatalities, health hazards, immigration, and health care issues. Some of the most important newspapers in Brazil, such as Folha de São Paulo and O Globo (The São Paulo Page and The Globe), carried reports about Brazilian immigration to the United States and workplace health and safety hazards faced by Brazilian immigrant workers.

In October 2003, project staff began a weekly UML radio talk show called Radiola Brasil (Radio Brazil) that discussed the activities of the project, the causes of work-related fatalities and injuries of Brazilian immigrant workers and how to prevent them, immigration and worker compensation laws, and health concerns of Brazilian immigrants. Radiola Brasil also broadcast information in Portuguese about social, economic, political, and cultural developments in Brazil and the United States.

Eco-village resident Valorie Rockney shows Malia Becker, age 9 years, how to hold a knife to cut parsley while preparing a community dinner for the residents of their ecologically sustainable village outside of Ithaca. Photograph by Gloria Wright. Printed with permission of Syracuse Online, LLC.

THE DORCHESTER OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH INITIATIVE

The Dorchester Occupational Health Initiative (DOHI) was a partnership among the Vietnamese-American Initiative for Development (Viet-AID), a community-based organization; MassCOSH; UML; the Bowdoin Street and Codman Square Health Centers (primary health care providers); New Ecology Inc, a nonprofit consultant organization; the Dorchester House Multi-Service Center; and the Cape Verdean organization UNIDO. The project aimed at assessing the occupational health needs of low-income and immigrant communities in Dorchester, a neighborhood of Boston.

Vietnamese floor finishers became the major target of the project after fatal fires killed 3 of them and led to 4 serious burns in 2004–2005. As a result, the partnership developed a campaign to prevent fatal fires and other hazards affecting Vietnamese immigrants in the hardwood floor finishing industry. One of the main components of the program was the creation of an ad-hoc Floor-Finishing Safety Task Force, which included manufacturers of oil-based products that are not flammable.

The Task Force issued the September 2005 report “Protecting Workers and Homeowners from Wood-Floor Finishing Hazards in Massachusetts”⁶ that summarized data about the industry, the fire, health effects of the solvents used in floor-finishing, and water-based alternatives to the flammable solvents. The report also provided a set of detailed recommendations for the state of Massachusetts, such as the establishment of a licensing program for floor-refinishing businesses; the promotion of tax incentives, low-interest loans, and grants to encourage the use of safe and healthier floor-finishing products; and development, in partnership with Project DOHI, of culturally and linguistically appropriate training materials.

The Floor-Finishing Safety Task Force presented a strong consensus position on eliminating the use of flammable finishing products, most notably lacquer sealers. The Task Force filed 2 pieces of legislation with the Massachusetts legislature: one requiring the certification of floor-finishers, which would require day-long safety training plus use of a posted safety checklist and mandatory information sheets to consumers, and another to ban the use of flammable products in floor finishing.

The project launched a media outreach campaign targeting Vietnamese-American floor-finishers in Dorchester aimed at increasing their awareness about occupational and environmental hazards and recruiting them to attend health and safety training. The media campaign included participation in Vietnamese public affairs television shows, radio announcements, and regular newspaper columns in 2 ethnic papers, combined with brochures, posters, and a Fatality Assessment and Control Evaluation Alert. The innovative approaches to crafting and disseminating outreach messages and the design of training successfully involved large numbers of immigrant floor-finishers to promote a reduction in use of flammable lacquer sealers and increase the sales of nonfire, safe cigarettes. By April 2007, about 39 Vietnamese workers had attended trainings in the use of water-based and very-low-volatile organic compound oil-based products. The trainings were hands-on and participatory and led by certified master floor-finishers, including one Vietnamese immigrant.

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE RESEARCH OF IMMIGRANT WORKERS

The definition of environment proposed by environmental justice activists and researchers is “the place where we live, where we work, and where we play.”^7(p142) The NIOSH and NIEHS Partnerships for Communication funding for environmental justice projects highlighted workplace health risks of low-income immigrant workers. The lack of empirical evidence to substantiate the role of work environment injustices in the overall environmental justice argument needs to be addressed with new research focused on workplace inequality as a source of injustice.⁸

Neither NIOSH nor NIEHS have had a long tradition of funding community-based projects that addressed occupational hazards affecting vulnerable immigrant populations. Although some of the methods used to identify and control work-related hazards are not innovative per se, the intense community-based grassroots work developed to collect data from those hard-to-reach workers certainly suggests that it is feasible to apply them to these immigrant worker populations. The 2 projects described above had to deal with language and cultural aspects that require research designs dependent on researchers developing long-term partnerships with community groups that were trusted by immigrant workers. In addition, immigration-related barriers such as lack of authorization for legal work and an anti-immigrant environment in several parts of the country add to the importance of such relationships.⁹

The communication and dissemination strategies adopted by these 2 and other funded projects contribute much to the growing effort of the National Institutes of Health to boost research translation. These partnerships enabled implementation of translation activities soon after results were analyzed. Information was disseminated through culturally appropriate media channels that had good penetration in the target groups. New avenues for dissemination of information through ethnic media outlets have been explored and are now opened for future collaborative initiatives. The policy impacts of the projects have been significant, as illustrated by the DOHI project.

In the 1990s, there was insufficient evidence upon which researchers could build solid partnerships with the new immigrant populations to address environmental justice problems. However, the experiences from both UML projects suggest that serious and promising progress has been made recently. It remains to be seen how the federal government will continue to fund and support such collaborations to make them a permanent feature of research projects funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Public Health Service.