The grisly death of a Latino at a Bumble Bee tuna plant puts a larger trend in sharp relief

*To put this in perspective, this week the AFL-CIO published its annual report on workplace safety. The findings: Latinos work in some of the most dangerous occupations, and because the majority are immigrants they are less likely to report workplace safety violations. VL

By Deena Shanker, Quartz

When the Los Angeles district attorney’s office filed charges yesterday (April 28) against Bumble Bee Foods and two company employees for their role in the 2012 death of Jose Melena, it was hard not to fixate on the grisly way Melena had died, trapped in an industrial oven that was cooking 12,000 pounds of tuna.1

The sensational details make it tempting to write this story off as a freak accident, but it unfortunately reflects a grim reality about on-the-job fatalities among Hispanic workers. In 2013, there were 817 fatal work injuries involving Hispanic or Latino workers, the highest since 2008. In the US, Hispanics are the only racial/ethnic group seeing an increase in these numbers, according to the US Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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[Photo courtesy of Quartz]