CPWR鈥擳he 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鈥攁t 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 鈥渙nce a week or more鈥 or 鈥渁 few times a month.鈥
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.
鈥淚t鈥檚 best if you can make sure that there鈥檚 someone bilingual on every team,鈥 said Maija Leff, associate director of the Carolina Center for Healthy Work Design and Worker Well-Being. 鈥淏etter if that bilingual person is actually your foreman or your lead man, someone who has some authority.鈥
Additional recommendations included involving workers in finding solutions for safer workplaces; implementing worker-led safety committees in workers鈥 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.
