The Man in the Dog Park by Cathy A. Small & Jason Kordosky & Ross Moore

Author:Cathy A. Small & Jason Kordosky & Ross Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2020-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

On the day Nicholas and Jason had this conversation, Nick was hiding his injury, but his swollen knee and its implications for his future work clearly preyed on his mind as he waited for his next ticket. “And honestly,” he remarked, “I’m scared.”

If you look at their posted policies and materials, agencies would seem to press their workers to follow safety-reporting protocols along with job safety procedures. Some agencies displayed one-page documents concerning safety on the wall near the sign-in counter, and they encouraged the workers to sign a form confirming they had read the document before going out on a job. If you looked closer, however, agencies could convey a mixed message about safety and injury that increased the uncertainty for many workers. A wall inside one agency, for instance, displayed posters with safety instructions, depicting proper lifting techniques; posted alongside them were prominent warning messages about worker’s compensation fraud.

It was not that workers were concerned about hiding a perpetrated fraud. It was rather that the warning messages had the effect of scaring and confusing them about reporting. Would claims of an injury or job-related illness be believed? If so, would they be thought of as irresponsible for getting injured or too damaged for hard work? Would they be branded as a “troublemaker”? Any of these possibilities might result in decreasing or shutting off their temp work options.

The uncertainty may explain why injuries or illness, when they did occur on the job (as they had with four of eighteen workers surveyed), often went unreported. Rick recounted one time when he had complained about becoming ill after he was sent through a temp service to a factory line:

It was a machine shop, and you had to punch out these metal pieces for the car industry. They sent them to, like, all three of the big, big ones like Ford, Chevy, and Dodge. And, basically, you had this punch press thing and it came down “clunk-clunk-clunk” and it would go really fast.

So, umm, it had this like antifreeze that was sprayed out from the side of the machine to keep the metal parts cold so they wouldn’t actually get super-hot where you couldn’t touch them. And the anti-freeze would spray up and hit you in the face. So it would drip in your mouth. So you really got antifreeze in your face, in your eyes, and in your mouth. And antifreeze is really, really not good. And they did that. And they sent you from the temp service over to do that.

. . . And I was feeling really ill from doing that like a month straight. And, uh, I said, “I can’t do this.” It cost me, you know. I mean I had to leave. And then of course once you leave a job, you quit. You gotta leave the temp service [too], ’cause they won’t, they won’t take you back.

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