"Accident-Prone Immigrants": An Assumption Challenged

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Abstract
The assumption that immigrant workers incur a disproportionately large number of industrial accidents does not seem to have been based on specific research evidence. Accordingly, a study was carried out of the accident and personnel records of five firms in the West Midlands over a one year period. Overall figures initially appeared to confirm that male immigrant workers had higher accident rates than other workers. However, total factory rates are meaningless because of the lack of control of risk. Thus, the next stage was to compare different ethnic groups doing the same work and with the same degree of risk. But here, immigrants were consistently found to be concentrated in different jobs to indigenous workers, so that in most cases a satisfactory comparison of accident rates was impossible. In the rare instance where there were comparable numbers of different ethnic groups in the same job exhibiting different accident rates, further investigation revealed differences in risk in either the task or the environment. Thus little evidence was found to suggest that cultural background related to industrial accidents. On the contrary, an apparent confirmation of the `accident-prone immigrant' at total factory level is attributable to immigrant workers' over-representation in the more dangerous jobs.

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