An article coauthored by UAP Professor and Director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies Edwin Mélendez has been accepted for publication by the journal International Migration and is currently available online. The article, Day Labourers’ Work Related Injuries: An Assessment of Risks, Choices, and Policies discusses the relationship between wages and the risk of work-related injury among Latino immigrants who find employment as day laborers in the US. According to the abstract, the authors find “a statistically significant wage premium
indicating that a risk-wage tradeoff within the day labour informal economy exists.” The authors propose that proper training, especially given through a formal “worker centre,” would mitigate some of the effects of the incentives toward higher-risk work present in the current system. They suggest that additional worker centers should be established to reach a higher percentage of day laborers.