CPWR—The Center for Construction Research and Training recently hosted a webinar, Improving Safety Climate for Hispanic Construction Workers, which examined findings from a study led by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Topics included the results from a survey of 500 construction workers and interviews with more than 50 workers—at least 85% of respondents were Latino, according to Safety+Health magazine.
Survey results show only about half of injured Latino workers reported workplace injuries or illnesses to their supervisors. Additionally, 51% of Spanish-speaking Latino workers and 67% of English-speaking Latino workers reported feeling ignored or not taken seriously by a supervisor either “once a week or more” or “a few times a month.”
To combat these issues, webinar presenters suggested increasing the number of Spanish-speaking supervisors in the field and prioritizing real-time interpretation on job sites by conducting important meetings in English and Spanish and identifying worker-translators with hard hat stickers or helmets of a different color.
“It’s best if you can make sure that there’s someone bilingual on every team,” said Maija Leff, associate director of the Carolina Center for Healthy Work Design and Worker Well-Being. “Better if that bilingual person is actually your foreman or your lead man, someone who has some authority.”
Additional recommendations included involving workers in finding solutions for safer workplaces; implementing worker-led safety committees in workers’ main languages; aligning safety messages with Latino cultural work values; teaching supervisors the differences between Latino and American culture; and ensuring all essential documents are available in English and Spanish.
