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How do you effectively teach safety to your Hispanic/Latino workers? At CoCal Landscape in Denver, Colorado, Safety Officer Mari Medrano says that it is important to make sure that (1) your training is presented at a level your employees can understand and (2) you use “hands-on” training examples.

“Most of our training is done in Spanish,” she says. “But you’ve got to come down to a level where they understand it.” For example, she explains, “Most crew members don’t think about ergonomics — ‘Should I bend at the knees and not my back?’ Instead, they tend to think, ‘I need to get the work done,’ rather than to think about doing the job safely. So, you need to show them how to do it safely.”

At CoCal, where approximately 88 percent of the company’s 460 employees are Hispanic, there is no question that safety training needs to be presented in Spanish. Medrano says that when the company tried having one safety meeting in English and another one in Spanish, “it wasn’t well liked and caused problems. People wondered, ‘Why are they inside and the others outside?’ So now, we keep everyone together and speak in both Spanish and English in the same safety meeting.”

In Mexico and many other Hispanic/Latino cultures, workers are taught to have great respect for persons in “authority.” This can sometimes present problems when doing safety training. For example, a supervisor might assume that his/her workers understood what was presented because no one asked any questions. Yet, the reason no questions were asked might solely be because the Hispanic/Latino employees were taught in their native country not to question anyone in “authority.”

Medrano says that body language is also very important. “The demeanor of a supervisor — the way the person’s body is positioned — toward a laborer might come off as offensive,” she says. “A good rule to follow is to think of all of your employees as people — not just as the group of people who work for you. If you’re friendly, you come down to their level, and if they see you practicing safety, then they’re going to do it, too.”

Medrano offers these additional tips for effectively teaching safety to your Hispanic/Latino workers:

· Make sure the Spanish you use is Spanish to which your workers can relate. Sometimes, formal translations do not take this into account. There might also be certain English terms, such as “weedeating,” that your crew members cannot understand (even in Spanish), because they have never heard the term or seen a weedeater before. In these cases, it is especially important to visually show them what you mean.

· Make use of drawings, pictures, and other graphics. Medrano says she adds graphics to the tailgate training topics she receives from ALCA and from CoCal’s insurance company. This is because many workers cannot read. Be sure not to assume that if your workers’ native language is Spanish, they can read or write in Spanish — they might not have had the opportunity in their country of origin to attend school and learn to read and write.

· Stress accountability. This is important for all of your workers, not just your Hispanic/Latino employees. “When we have accidents, we have the person who was involved in the accident explain what happened and what he or she will do differently next time,” Medrano says. “We do this during safety meetings, not to embarrass the person, but to stress accountability.”

· Do not expect your workers to automatically know what to do to be safe. “I did a truck inspection recently and came across a new driver. I took the opportunity to say, ‘This is what needs to be done. As a driver, you are responsible for safety in and around your truck.’ Then, I actually showed him what to do,” she says.


11/04

By Barbara Mulhern, ALCA Safety Specialist