Workforce Language Services

Do we train our non-English speaking staff to learn English? Do we train our English-speaking managers to learn Spanish? Do we translate our employee handbooks and other materials into Spanish? These are common questions, not just in clubs but also across industries, as employers struggle with a multilingual workforce – and with largely English-only management.

As Jill Kushner Bishop (president and founder of Workforce Language Services, the company behind this blog you’re reading) explains, these questions deserve thought not only for directors of private clubs, for whom this article was written, but also for managers in any type of industry seeking to integrate non-English speakers into their company’s culture.  She briefly highlights the benefits of an affirmative answer to all above questions, and increased employee morale, retention, and productivity can be strong motivators when considering how to implement her suggested solutions. 

Please click here to read further.

The Student Worker organization at CU is training students volunteers to work one-on-one with Spanish speaking staff to teach them English.  The program’s benefits are two-fold: it improves cultural sensitivity towards staff that doesn’t speak English, and helps Spanish speaking staff to gain language skills.  Nearly 48 percent of service and maintenance staff are Latino, but the university isn’t clear on how many of them only speak Spanish, as there are many positions in which it’s not necessary to speak English.  Currently this program is all volunteer, both for the tutors and the learners.  But the Student Worker organization is attempting to garner support from various departments so that ESL classes can become part of workers’ paid work schedule.

Despite the mention of a sometimes hostile and disrespectful environment, students have shown their interest and support:

“We’ve had an overwhelming number of students contact us interested in volunteering,” said Patrick Kelsall, 21, a junior sociology major and member of Student Worker. “We didn’t really expect it to be this popular.”

Student Worker uses the nonprofit organization Intercambio as a teaching resource for training students to tutor staff members. Intercambio works to build respectful communities and broaden opportunities for immigrants through language education.

Volunteers are required to go through four to six hours of training with Intercambio. They are given background information about program, and curriculum and tips for teaching English.

A Spanish background is not needed in order to provide English lessons to staff members, a Student Worker members said.

Read more here.

OSHA reports from 2006 show a frightening correlation between deaths of construction workers and lack of English-speaking skills, especially for Hispanics and those born outside of the U.S.  The reports also show that those working non-union jobs experience a higher rate of fatality than those working for unions.  Anecdotal evidence of sacrificing safety measures for speed points to the need for enforcement of safety procedures and instruction for non-English speakers in their own language.  Learning English is a process that takes years, and while many of these construction workers may be moving towards fluency, this article shows the need for immediate attention to safety in workers’ native languages. 

Oscar Paredes, executive director of the Latin American Workers Project, said outreach and training by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and city agencies are ineffective because of the language barrier.

“The city government doesn’t have a lot of people who speak the language or that can offer the appropriate training,” he said.

Paredes said some workers ignore safety precautions, sometimes because they are apathetic, or sometimes because they are afraid to lose their job if they refuse to perform a dangerous task, such as scaling heights with no harnesses or guardrails.

“If you don’t go up, you lose the work,” he said.

No one doubts the importance of learning English for immigrant workers, but when their lives are at risk, the construction industry needs to meet them where they are language-wise. 

There is also a cultural issue at play, especially when workers come from countries where safety measure are lax or non-existent. 

It’s no secret that the construction industry is becoming more and more Hispanic, and we continue to see this trend in the media and from our clients. This article outlines the importance of learning Spanish to better manage an Hispanic worforce.

Recent years have seen a large influx of Hispanic workers into the allied trades, particularly drywall and concrete work. In fact, a 2004 study by professors at the Texas A&M University reported that Hispanics are the fastest-growing minority population in the construction industry.

The recruitment of Hispanic workers into the construction industry is complicated, however, by the large number of immigrants who speak English sparingly, if at all. Whether the language factor contributes to the inordinately high percentage of Hispanic fatalities in the construction industry, which was the focus of the Texas A&M study, is open to debate. But no one doubts that it is imperative for supervisors to be able to communicate with workers — and for workers to be able to communicate with each other — on the construction site.

Lately the industry has been shifting direction regarding the language issue. Years ago, the effort was directed without much success at urging Spanish-speaking workers to learn English as a second language. Now, there are programs through Associated General Contractors that provide Spanish-language training for English-speaking construction superintendents and foremen.

As this article notes, language use and language preferences differ dramatically based on generation in the US and level of acculturation.

When it comes to reaching Hispanics, using Spanish-language advertising might seem like a no-brainer. But according to a new study from Simmons Research, a New York-based tracker of consumer behavior, that’s not necessarily the case. While first-generation Hispanics prefer Spanish-language advertising because it’s easier to understand, second- and especially third-generation Hispanics are somewhat indifferent to it.

With an increase in immigrants of all language backgrounds, hospitals are recognizing the need for additional full-time interpreters. The Chicago Tribune notes that it’s not just Spanish-speaking patients, but patients of many languages backgrounds, that increasingly need interpretation services. Rather than rely on a family member or custodian to interpret sensitive medical information for patients, hospitals increasingly use telephonic interpretation and have increased their onsite interpretation staff. They also are finding, however, that it’s not just the language but the culture that comes into play in the clinical setting.

One minute, Cristina Villanueva is in the neonatal nursery explaining to a Spanish-speaking mother why her English-speaking doctor won’t let her baby go home right away. The next she is hurrying to the emergency room to interpret for a Mexican patient admitted for a bleeding ulcer. Then it’s off to the front office to assist a Spanish-speaking woman about to have an MRI.

From the delivery room to the chaplain’s office, Villanueva and a team of 10 other Spanish-speaking interpreters spend their days crisscrossing Sherman Hospital in Elgin, where nearly a quarter of the patients are Hispanic. Villanueva lives with the constant chirp of her pager. She says she walks up to 6 miles a day in her thick-soled, black shoes, dashing through the hospital’s halls to keep up with Hispanic patients’ needs.

Spurred by the surge of immigrants in the suburbs — and a growing awareness of the potential dangers of miscommunication — hospitals and clinics that once relied on secretaries, janitors or even children to explain complicated medical terminology and deliver life-altering diagnoses are increasingly hiring interpreters, training bilingual professional staff and using phone interpreting services to bridge the language gap.

Health-care advocates say the need has become especially acute in communities trying to keep pace with fast-growing immigrant populations.

Even for those who speak English well, there’s often a need to modify speakers’ pronunciation to help ensure that they are understood. This article describes this type of training in more detail - training that we at Workforce Language Services also offer.

It was not what Sergei Petukhov said. It was how he said it.

“The way I said ‘accent reduction,’ he couldn’t understand me,” Petukhov said. That was enough for Petukhov, a Moscow native who works for the law firm Kaye Scholer as a scientific adviser, to get his employer’s approval to pay for training to decrease his Russian accent.

He is one of many educated, non-native English speakers working in the United States who take voice training and accent reduction to improve presentations, workshops and everyday conversations with their American-born co-workers.

Petukhov’s accent coach, Jennifer Pawlitschek, said that from her experience in New York, the field is growing. “Here it’s hot, and I think it’s because it’s an international crossroads,” she said, both because the United Nations is in the city and because of New York’s role in global financial markets.

Pawlitschek, who has a Master of Fine Arts degree in drama from the University of California, Irvine, said “the posture of the mouth” affects accent. She teaches how to change “the way you hold your jaw, lips and tongue,” along with stress and intonation.

She contended that the term “accent reduction” is a misnomer. “Accent reduction is learning an accent. It is learning an American accent,” she said.

In Houston, and throughout the U.S., a growing number of Latinos die in work-related accidents.  As the following article points out, the increase in the number of tragic incidents, both in Houston and nationally, once again underscores the importance of comprehensive safety trainings that are designed with the workers’ language skills in mind.  The consequences of ignoring employees’ varying language skills are indeed grave.  As quoted in the article, understanding workplace safety warnings in English can make the difference between life and death. 

Moreno’s horrific fate was one experienced by a growing number of Latinos in Harris County, and hundreds who died in workplaces across the nation. From July 2006 to July 2007 in Harris County, 16 of the 24 workers who died in workplace accidents were Latino. Eighteen Latinos were among the 31 workers who died in the county in the same time period the year before, according to Occupational Safety and Health Administration records.

According to a report issued last month, 937 Latino workers were killed nationwide in workplace accidents in 2006, the highest number since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping fatalities by ethnic and racial categories in 1992.

According to the August BLS report, while Hispanics make up roughly 12 percent of the work force, they accounted for 16 percent of on-the-job fatalities in 2006.

Latinos are disproportionately employed in the more dangerous industries, according to OSHA. For example, the construction industry accounts for about 7 percent of all employment, but 20 percent of fatalities.

Latinos comprise almost 15 percent of construction employment, well above their representation in the work force overall. OSHA’s data on Latino workers includes native- and foreign-born workers.

I just came across this information and though that if anyone was in Arizona and wanted to participate on this project, they could contact the organizer… They seem to be looking for interpretors / translators to join their team. Read more.

BISBEE — A volunteer team of medical professionals is being formed to conduct limited screenings and health interviews of striking copper miners in Cananea, Sonora, and organizers hope to add some local health professionals and translators to the team.

Garrett Brown, Maquiladora Health and Safety Support Network coordinator, is one of the organizers of the four-day excursion, Oct. 5-8, to Cananea. He is looking for Spanish-speaking volunteers to help with translation and health services for the team members that will interview those striking miners still remaining in Sierra Vista’s sister city.

“We are trying to put together a volunteer team, all expenses paid but no fees, to conduct limited medical screenings and industrial hygiene-related interviews of some of the miners who have been on strike for seven weeks against the giant Grupo Mexico conglomerate at the Cananea mine where the 1910 Mexican Revolution began,” he said.

…The October team includes Dr. Robert Cohen and senior pulmonary technician Moises Ortega from Cook County Hospital in Chicago; Dr. Marian Fierro, a Mexican occupational health physician currently conducting research at the University of Arizona in Tucson; Heather Barr, an occupational health nurse practitioner at University of California-San Francisco; Enrique Medina, a certified industrial hygienists from San Diego; Ingrid Zubieta, an industrial hygienist from UCLA’s Labor Occupational Safety and Health Program in Los Angeles; and Brown.

How to help

The project will go to Cananea, Sonora, Mexico, on Oct. 5-8. If you or anyone you know are potentially available for this emergency short-term project, contact Garrett Brown at gdbrown@igc.org or (510) 558-1014 or (510) 622-2913.

Having limited English proficient populations can have a real effect on how public agencies provide services. Agencies need to adapt to the populations they serve. In this case in the UK, increased immigrant populations is making their police force start to spend more resources on translation and interpretation services. That’s good news. Maybe the next step will be to provide occupational language training - or even begin to hire more officers who are proficient in the community language. Read more.

“The force makes every effort to consider the needs of the people we serve and is working hard to adapt where necessary.” One of the measures has been offering Polish lessons to a number of officers in Slough, which has enabled them to communicate with the growing population.

Due to the rising migrant populations, the force has increased spending on translation from £76,000 in 1997 to more than £1m in the last financial year. Cambridgeshire had an £800,000 translation bill.

Ch Con Thornton added: “These costs are not an optional extra but an integral part of policing our communities. These costs are for face-to-face and telephone interpretations for both victims and offenders.”