Starbucks Holds Hiring Event for Refugees in San Diego, TB Rates Among Highest in Country

Starbucks held a hiring event exclusively for refugees in El Cajon, California on Tuesday, part of its recently announced commitment to hire more than 10,000 refugees over the next five years.

El Cajon is located in San Diego County, where more than 20,000 refugees have have been [forcibly] resettled by the federal government in the past nine and a half years since the beginning of Fiscal Year 2008.

A 2013 study from a research team led by Dr. Timothy Rodwell, “an associate professor and physician in the Division of Global Health at UCSD [University of California at San Diego]” that “analyzed data from LTBI [latent tuberculosis infection] screening results of 4,280 refugees resettled in San Diego County between January 2010 and October 2012,” noted that “San Diego County, in California, is a leading refugee resettlement site, and it also has one of the highest rates of active TB in the country, with an incidence rate of 8.4 cases per 100 000 people in 2011.” (The incidence rate in the entire population in the United States in 2016 was 2.9 per 100,000).

The study, which was funded in part by the National Institutes of Health, found that, of the 4,280 refugees resettled in San Diego County during the 34 months beginning in January 2010:

Nine hundred sixteen refugees (21.4%) in the study had a positive QFT-GIT result (Table 1). Of those, 823 (89.8%) had a normal chest radiograph and were diagnosed with LTBI (Figure 1). Sixty-one (6.7%) did not receive a chest radiograph; 14 (1.5%) had an abnormal result that was consistent with active TB; and 18 (2.0%) had an abnormal result that was not consistent with active TB.

In other words, the incidence of active TB among the 4,280 refugees who were resettled in San Diego County between January 2010 and October 2012 was 327 per 100,000, more than 100 times greater than the incidence of active TB among the entire population of the United States in 2016...

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CAIRCO Note

To hell with 10,000 American workers! This is blatant job discrimination. Starbucks knows that refugees will work for less than American workers, and doesn't seem to care a whit about workplace and customer health.

Time to switch to Peet's Coffee! You can order Peet's Coffee online!