When he was still a teenager, Francisco Moreno Garcia left his small hometown in southern Mexico for El Norte more than a decade ago to earn money for his family.
He worked in California, then he and his cousin headed to Decatur, Ill., where they heard there were good jobs at the Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) bioproducts plant.
But the job he hoped would sustain his parents and siblings back in Mexico instead took his life. In a landmark decision on Sept. 11, a mostly white jury agreed that Garcia’s life was worth just as much as that of a wealthy white American, as attorney Donald Shapiro describes it, and ordered ADM to pay $6.7 million to Garcia’s family back in Mexico.
On March 23, 2007, Garcia, 26, was insulating pipes 15 feet in the air when a waste compression system malfunctioned, and he was sprayed with steam and hot caustic chemicals. Garcia struggled to free himself from his harness and tumbled to the ground, third degree burns covering 90 percent of his body, his flesh soon starting to slough off.
For the next day and a half, horrified doctors and nurses tried to save him. His body bloated to twice its normal size from the infusion of fluids needed to sustain severe burn victims, and then his flesh began to turn black as necropsy set in. “At that point they basically gave up,” said Shapiro.
This story is, chillingly, not especially unusual. Latino immigrant workers have significantly higher workplace death and injury rates than other groups, as documented by a number of studies over the years, including a National Council of La Raza report this month.
But it is relatively rare that immigrant victims of workplace accidents sue their employers; often they don’t even collect the relatively meager amount of workers compensation due them. Workers compensation regulations essentially prohibit suing an employer; Garcia’s estate was able to sue ADM since he was employed by a subcontractor, Shapiro explained.
The workers compensation payment for his death was only $60,000, most of which will be returned to an insurance company when the wrongful death payment is made.
From rebuilding Iraq and New Orleans to countless industrial, farming and mining jobs throughout the U.S., subcontractor situations often result in the most dangerous or exploitative conditions for migrant workers, since the main company uses the subcontractor relationship to try to insulate themselves from accountability.
But the jury, who reached their verdict in four hours, nonetheless held ADM accountable.
The award was one of the largest such judgments in state history for a single man with no spouse or children. And it came just a week before the release of The Informant!, a dramatic comedy based on ADM’s 1990s price-fixing scandal regarding lysine, an amino acid and feed additive.
Over the past decade, the death toll of Latino workers, many of them immigrants, has been steadily rising, according to the AFL-CIO’s annual Death on the Job reports.
Latino immigrants are especially likely to work in construction, meatpacking and other inherently dangerous jobs. But even in the construction field, their death rate is significantly higher than for non-Latinos, according to the AFL-CIO.
The workplace fatality and injury rate is crucial for the public and legislators to keep in mind as the Administration has pledged to take on immigration reform in coming months. The jury’s decision in Decatur is a sign that even as much anti-immigrant sentiment exists – witness South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson’s “you lie” outburst – there is also much sympathy and empathy for hard-working immigrants in places like Decatur, a prime symbol of heartland, hardscrabble America, as detailed in ITT blogger Stephen Franklin’s book Three Strikes.
Shapiro said ADM offered him $500,000 and then a maximum $850,000 to settle the case, likely expecting a Decatur-area jury would not decide on a large award. He turned the offers down quickly, confident the jury would empathize with Garcia’s family south of the border.
“My opinion was, I think they are people just like anyone else,” he said. “If they hear facts like this they’re going to do the right thing, and the jury did.”
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Kari Lydersen is a Chicago-based journalist, author and assistant professor at Northwestern University, where she leads the investigative specialization at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. Her books include Mayor 1%: Rahm Emanuel and the Rise of Chicago’s 99%.
