An East Freetown concrete company has been cited by the Department of Labor for multiple workplace safety violations that resulted in the death of a 24-year-old Guatemalan laborer in September.
The company, John Oliveira & Sons Stamp Concrete, faces $201,000 in fines from the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The federal investigation found six violations of workplace safety standards at the time of the accident, including that the company did not provide helmets and other safety equipment to its workers.
The company could have prevented the death, according to OSHA area director James Mulligan.
“John Oliveira & Sons Stamp Concrete Inc.’s failure to employ well-known safeguards needlessly cost a worker’s life,” Mulligan said in a press release.
The worker, whose name is Josué Tiquiram, died after his head was crushed between the arms of an industrial machine that is used to sift gravel from dirt. He was not wearing a helmet, said Tiquiram’s uncle, Maximo Tiquiram Quinilla, who spoke to the Light in September.
“He should not be dead,” said Quinilla, who had worked alongside Tiquiram each day at the concrete company and himself witnessed the accident. “He wasn’t wearing a helmet. The company doesn’t require that we wear a helmet.”
Tiquiram had recently immigrated from the highlands of his native Guatemala. He was seeking a way to provide for his parents, who are tenant farmers, and seven young siblings, according to Quinilla.
“His dream was to buy a piece of land and build a house. Not for him, but for his whole family. That was not possible there.” Quinilla said, speaking in Spanish through a translator. “He told his dad: ‘I’m going to the United States. I am going to send you money. I am going to support the family.’”
Tiquiram was one of many immigrants in New Bedford working in the construction industry, often under dangerous conditions with little regulatory oversight. In Massachusetts, 18 construction workers died on the job in 2021, the most recent year that data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is available. There is no data indicating how many of those workers were immigrants.
John Oliveira & Sons Stamp Concrete, Inc., a family-owned business that specializes in paving roads and cement work, declined to comment. Prior to the accident, the company had not been inspected by OSHA in at least the last 10 years, according to the agency’s database.
On Sept. 23, Tiquiram’s body was returned to his Guatemalan hometown of San Andreas Sajcabajá in a light blue casket — a tragic symbol of dreams unfulfilled and the dangerous conditions under which immigrants are willing to work to achieve them.
“He wanted to return,” his uncle said. “But not like this.”
Email reporter Will Sennott at wsennott@newbedfordlight.org.
