Hispanic workforce at risk

Hispanic and Latino workers are consistently the minority group with the most workplace injuries and fatalities and comprise a subset of workers where injuries are rising when overall figures are dipping, yet there is no easy solution to the problem, safety experts say.

Simply providing training or safety notices in Spanish is rarely enough, and a more nuanced approach is needed to reverse the injury trends, they say.

Adapting training protocols and finding Spanish-speaking safety advocates within a workforce can go a long way toward reducing workplace injuries.

“Employers say ‘language barrier,’ then they say, ‘let’s translate the information,’ but it goes past that,” said Luz Marin, an assistant professor in the Department of Safety Sciences with Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s College of Health and Human Services in Indiana, Pennsylvania.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows a steady rise in workplace fatalities among a group it categorizes as “Latino” or “Hispanic” over 10 years to 903 in 2017 from 713 in 2009 — a rise that exceeds the increase in overall fatality figures.

Injury data paints another picture: While injuries that force workers to take time off for all private industries are trending downward, the numbers show a steady rise year after year for Latinos or Hispanics, with a dip in 2017. The 2018 figures will be available in December.

According to BLS data, the nonfatal injury total for Latino/Hispanic workers was about 40% of the total for white workers, which make up a far larger proportion of the workforce, and not far short of double the total for black workers.

“It’s known that Hispanic and Latino workers are the ones who tend to suffer the most fatalities and injuries … unfortunately, some people wait until they get cited or suffer a fatality or major injury or catastrophe to make changes,” said Jesse Valencia, a consultant with G&A Outsourcing, which does business as G&A Partners, a Houston-based human resources firm that offers safety management and other services to smaller companies.

“I still give those who are reactive credit. They say, ‘We know we have a problem and let’s fix it.’”

Examples of citations by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration where language or lack or training for Spanish-speaking workers are named a factor are hard to come by, as the language requirements are not explicitly stated in the standards. As OSHA wrote on its website, “while there are construction standards that require training and instructions, there are no OSHA construction standards that specifically require that such information be conveyed and understood in English” (see related story).

“People are struggling with how to address unique issues related to safety and health of (Latino) workers in the industry,” said Rick Rinehart, the director for the Silver Springs, Maryland-based Center for Construction Research and Training, which has published research comparing fatality numbers among Latinos with the size of construction firms, finding that the smaller the companies, the higher the number of fatalities. “We are trying to better understand how to reach those audiences.”

The immigration status of workers can also create hurdles for safety training (see related story).

“If we understand what is happening and why, we will better be able to develop safety programs,” said Ms. Marin. “We have to ask, what is the root cause?” Construction In 2009, as part of a research project in the Boston area, Ms. Marin interviewed more than a hundred supervisors and Latino workers to explore why those in construction suffer a higher proportion of injuries than other minority groups.

Only 25.5% said training was adequate, 13.8% said safety was secondary to production, and 53.6% said protective equipment was unavailable. But those were just numbers, and what they said in the interviews about safety was just as informative, she said.

In the interviews, with transcripts published in the Environmental Health Journal in 2015, some workers admitted to signing off on training forms when they did not understand what they had been instructed to do. One worker gave this response: “I have noticed that a lot of people in this line of work don’t even know how to read. That is a big problem, too. There are signs in Spanish, and they go (into an unsafe zone) anyway because they can’t read what the sign says, and that is a big problem that causes a lot of accidents.”

“Some (employers) go in and press play on a video and expect the workers to understand,” said Mr. Valencia of G&A Partners, who said formalized training — which some workers find intimidating — can complicate the process.

“What I have learned it is that they may be afraid of losing their job if they openly say that they did not understand the training,” said Ms. Marin. “They don’t want to be a target or stand out because of their lack of language proficiency.”

No easy solutions

From translated signage and PowerPoints to toolkits that put everything in Spanish, safety experts say a focus on creating solutions has been in the works for more than a decade. Results have been mixed, raising questions about whether employers are implementing the practices effectively, or whether the employers are doing anything at all, they say.

“The struggle with employers is they don’t have the correct resources or they don’t know where to go,” said Charity Madrid-Torres, a health and safety specialist in risk management services with the University of Arizona in Tucson, which employs Spanish-speaking workers services. Sometimes an employer may not know there’s an issue with language until there’s an injury, she said.

“We see this with Hispanic and Latino workers who apply for a job online and it’s their (English-speaking) children” who fill out the forms, she said. “And they sign off on (training), but when they are injured, we find out we can’t communicate with them. It creates a lot of confusion and a dangerous situation.”

The issue caught the attention of the American Society of Safety Professionals, which formed its Hispanic Outreach Working Group in 2017 to address why Hispanic workers were killed on the job more than other minority groups.

In 2018, the Park Ridge, Illinois-based group called for more collaboration and a clearinghouse for tools for employers to put into place, among other objectives.

OSHA also has an information online, as do other organizations, but translations aren’t always simple and cultural differences come into play, experts say.

Carlos Galindo, Chicago-based health and safety director for U.S. Compliance Corp., a firm that provides environmental health and safety consulting for manufacturers, cautions against simply translating material. A photograph of a workplace sign he showed in a presentation at the American Society of Safety Professionals’ annual conference in New Orleans in June told workers in Spanish to “Look at the stairs” — not “Watch out!” or “Caution!” but to “marvel” at a staircase.

“It isn’t as simple as putting something into Google Translate,” he said. One sign he displayed urged workers in English to let faucets drip during the winter; the Spanish version referred to a set of “keys” and “rent.”

Training practices

Employers should “avoid PowerPoint,” said Juan Chiquillo, a senior safety manager with Greencastle, Pennsylvania-based Boral Industries Inc., which provides architectural stone and other materials for buildings and whose plants mostly employ Hispanic workers.

“The first thing you have is a traditional challenge” when it comes to training and instructing a Spanish-speaking workforce, he said. “This is training a population, any population … and PowerPoints are one of the worst ways to train in general.

At the end of training, you will ask ‘Any questions?’ and most people will say no and then sign a little piece of paper for OSHA. Here (with Spanish-speaking workers) you are adding layers and layers of traditional training.”

He said some of the best practices in traditional safety training are transferable to training Spanish-speaking workers: smaller group settings, short instruction periods, hands on opportunities, more question-and-answer sessions and testing for skills acquisitions and proficiency.

“That’s the reality, the need, for safety in general,” he said. “Those are the traditional challenges, getting the commitment to safety that some companies don’t want to do, and now you have a population that only speaks Spanish … add those factors in and you have a recipe” for accidents.

Another tactic that borrows from traditional safety best practices is to find and cultivate leaders in the workforce, safety experts said.

“We have this tendency to think people cannot step up to the plate,” said Mr. Chiquillo, adding that with Latino culture, community is important. “Look for your leaders and empower them.”

Mr. Valencia said that tactic has worked for companies he consults with. “Don’t be afraid to learn from your people,” he said of the best practice of seeking leaders in the workforce and empowering them to help train their Spanish-speaking co-workers. “You will find that they will coach each other.”

Estamos contratando: safety hiring

The ASSP is now pushing its members to hire, train and mentor more bilingual safety professionals.

“That’s one of our biggest components,” said Jorge Otalora, who heads the organization’s Hispanic Safety Professionals group and works as a safety director for the Washington division of Birmingham, Alabama-based Hoar Construction LLC.

“We are campaigning to bring people from the (workforce) and turn them into safety professionals. The companies can help by identifying bilingual workers who are leaders among their people … bring them in and give them the tools,” Mr. Otalora said.

Mr. Galindo calls a bilingual safety professional in a company’s workforce the “Holy Grail” when it comes to solving the issues surrounding dangerous work conditions for Spanish-speaking workers.

“Promote from within” is what Mr. Galindo tells companies grappling with safety issues. “Encourage your leaders to be a part of the safety committee and go from there.”