Workforce Language Services

Last week I presented a session at the 69th Annual Wisconsin Safety & Health Conference.  In the US, there are approximately 50 million Latinos –  one in six Americans (and 1 in 4 children!) – and the Hispanic population accounts for over half of US population growth in the last decade.  I shared some eye-opening statistics, such as the following:

• 14 people die every day at work.
• The workplace fatality rate among Latinos is 13.5% higher than for US workers overall.
• Of the 11,303 Latino workers who died from work-related injuries from 2003-2006, 34% worked in construction.

Why is the fatality rate so much higher among Latinos?  For starters, Latino immigrants work in high-risk jobs, such as construction, at a higher rate than the general population.  Then there’s the language barrier.  Approximately 65% of low-wage immigrant workers are Limited English Proficient (LEP), and not surprisingly, OSHA estimates that over a quarter of workplace injuries are attributable to the language barrier.

But it’s not just language; it’s culture, too.  Among Latino immigrants, safety is often viewed through a different lens.  Back home, there are far fewer government inspections of work sites, and in the event of a violation, a bribe often makes it go away.  Workers may be required to risk their safety, as workers are often perceived is dispensable.  Is this in every work site?  Of course not.  But it’s not uncommon.

In the US, these workers often fear that a complaint about unsafe work conditions or a request for personal protective equipment would cause them to lose their job.  And what about reporting workplace injuries? There is the same concern. Moreover, for undocumented workers, a fear of deportation frequently serves as further motivation to quietly self-treat injuries that should be reported and treated.  There’s also the perception that safety regulations exist to protect American-born workers, who aren’t as “tough,” as well as the perception that the government doesn’t truly care about immigrant workers and their well-being.

So what can you do to improve the safety of your workplace?  Some suggestions:

1. Ensure that safety materials are reader-friendly and translated into the language(s) of your workforce.  But that’s not enough: lower levels of literacy mean that you need to be sure to then train people – in their language – to ensure that these procedures and policies are understood.  This can be done by hiring an interpreter or by using a bilingual supervisor.
2. Consider offering job-specific English as a Second Language training.  This will help improve safety, productivity and engagement, and it will also help increase your pool of internal promotion candidates.
3. Consider offering job-specific Spanish training (as well as other languages of your workplace).  With a focus on safety expressions and other key vocabulary, your managers will significantly increase their communication skills while at the same time developing your employees’ trust.

Workplace safety is too important to cut corners.  Don’t let things get lost in translation!

-Jill Kushner Bishop, PhD

With more than 45 million Latinos in the United States and the Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasting the ethnic group to account for 30% of the population by 2050, Latinos are now the fastest-growing segment of the population. Restaurants are now targeting the Latino population with Spanish-language signage, marketing campaigns, translated menus and other strategies.

Read more http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3190/is_23_44/ai_n56328251/?tag=content;col1

Immigration reform is one the most controversial political topics today. Let’s face it: any decision made related to immigration crackdowns are going to affect our workforce, where many sectors are based on cheap, unskilled labor that immigrants provide. For better or for worse, how will these crackdowns affect the U.S. workforce?

The New York Times uses Michel Malecot as an example, who is the owner of a small French restaurant in San Diego. He was charged and indicted with charges of employing 12 illegal immigrants. If found guilty, he faces the forfeiture of his restaurant and up to $4 million in fines.

The Obama administration has been getting tough on immigration enforcement laws, which were once considered lax. This year federal employees expect to announce a record number of investigation and fines.

Taking a look at the restaurant industry, 1.4 million workers, both legal and illegal, are foreign-born. “According to 2008 estimates from the Pew Hispanic Center, about 20 percent of the nearly 2.6 million chefs, head cooks and cooks are illegal immigrants. Among the 360,000 dishwashers, 28 percent are undocumented, according to the estimates.”

While hiring illegal immigrants may be industry standard, the crackdowns are welcomed from many immigrant rights supporters, who see that illegal immigrants are underpaid and also afraid of complaining to their employers.

It can be complicated business for everyone involved. Employers don’t want the burden of policing their employees when they provide what appears to be legal paperwork, and even electronic verification systems have incorrect information that could turn away eligible workers. Many employers are now petitioning for immigration reform that makes it easier for undocumented workers to gain legal status.

Read the full NYTimes article here.

Many Korean immigrants have recently found themselves in the Korean American Resource and Cultural Center taking classes in—what else?—Spanish. People like Sue Choe, who owns a laundromat in Koreatown, see many reasons to learn the language that many of her customers speak.

Aware of an ugly history between Korean-Americans and African-Americans–one that erupted into violence in some cities in the 1990s–Korean business owners are trying to soothe mutual suspicions with Spanish-speaking workers and customers. The effort is mostly born of an increasingly interdependent employer-employee relationship.

It is just one of the ways in which new waves of immigration and intermigration between neighborhoods is fast changing the city, mixing new combinations of ethnic groups together and forcing them to search for ways to coexist as so many previous generations of immigrants did.

Beginning a community dialogue is important, especially recalling the 1992 race riots in Los Angeles. It’s also important because Koreans and Hispanics don’t just live in the same communities, they work together too. Hispanics have become the primary labor pool for Korean business owners, and cultural differences have erupted in the workplace.

Latino workers, many earning less than the minimum wage, complain that their Korean bosses neglect to pay overtime and are often callous about days off or job-related injuries.

In turn Korean owners, at times unfamiliar with U.S. labor laws, see ingratitude and disloyalty in their employees’ complaints. They argue that their up-from-the-ground businesses are a team effort that also has the owners working long hours.

Disputes have hurt both sides.  Learning to understand the cultures around you (and their languages) is a great start. Read the full Chicago Tribune article about this issue here.

Want to learn the languages spoken in your neighborhood? Visit MultilingualChicago.com to learn about language classes and workshops in your area!

Click here to watch WLS’s founder and president Jill Bishop eloquently explain our language and cultural training services at the Midwest Security & Police Conference/Expo. (Once you’re on the page, click on the video icon.)

Some talking points:

Hispanics make up around 15% of the U.S. population, and that number will triple by 2050. Is your organization prepared for the linguistic and cultural challenges?

In our “Spanish for Law Enforcement” trainings, WLS doesn’t focus on that grammar you learned back in 9th grade and have forgotten since. You’ll learn industry-specific terminology that you can use instantly on the job. We’ll help you anticipate challenges and find the appropriate solutions.

WLS offers onsite, customized trainings and workshops to help employers (from police departements to restaurants) prepare their employees for any linguistic or cultural situation that may come up in their industry.

As Jill says, “It’s all about the expressions you need to do your job better.”

A labor group surveyed restaurants in Chicago and found significant segregation between front-of-house workers (waiters, hosts) and back-of-house staff (busboys, dishwashers). The study “found that nearly 80 percent of whites work in the front, nearly two-thirds of Latinos in the back.”

To those of us who have worked in the restaurant business this doesn’t seem like news at all – the discrimination is all too prevalent.  Common all over Chicago’s pubs and steakhouses, we see that “taking the order or seating the clients is the girl next door or a suave older man, most likely white, while a cadre of young Mexican men construct the meal behind the scenes.”

Taking the issue to task, the Restaurant Opportunities Center of Chicago teamed with the Working Hands Legal Clinic to file a federal lawsuit against one Andersonville eatery, claiming that the establishment mistreated its kitchen staff. McCormick and Schmicks’ chain just settled a $1.1 claim from black employees who said they weren’t considered for hosts and servers.

But in the restaurants’ defense, aren’t they hiring based on a special skill set required for that position, not based on race? For example, knowledge of food and wine pairings or simply communicating a food order in English.

I would argue that while restaurants don’t always discriminate blatantly, they rarely train or promote their current back-of-house staff. Wouldn’t a restaurant get better long-term results from a staffer with a long employment history at the restaurant, happy to be promoted, than a new hire? Busboy to server would be the perfect transition, for example.

To read the full report in the Chicago Tribune, click here.

While Latinos make up more than a third of the Texan workforce, they earn 35% less than their white counterparts, reports the Texan Tribune.

On average, they earn about $11.50 per hour, compared to $17.90 for non-Hispanic whites. The gap is larger here than in the rest of the country: Outside of Texas, Latinos earn $12.42, while their Anglo counterparts earn about $17.55.

Regardless of skill, Latinos were responsible for most of the expansion in the state’s labor pool since the mid-1990s and have been a boon to the state’s economy. “The Latino population’s increase transformed Texas’ labor force and led to faster economic growth,” the report says. “Latinos accounted for 76 percent of the state’s labor force growth between 1994 and 2008.”

One factor that may account for the discrepancy is the education gap. 40% of Latinos age 25 or older didn’t graduate from high school, compared to 5% of whites. However, some educators say that cultural and economic factors often trump the importance of going to school; the responsibility to take care of one’s family has an impact on dropout rates.

Read more about the Latino pay gap here, in the Texan Tribune.

Sad, but true — a local Chicago non-profit will be closing its doors after 18 years due to the economic downturn. The MultiCultural Development Center (MCDC) has been an area leader in education related to issues of diversity and cultural inclusion.

From the December 7 press release:

Through its many programs, thousands of participants gained new understanding and knowledge regarding the many people and cultures that make up the world in which we live. The goal of MCDC has been to help build a culture where the attitudes and actions of people foster mutual respect so that people of all backgrounds can fully participate in the workplace as well as in the community.

From 1991 to 2009, MCDC educated thousands of people by promoting cultural understanding and inclusiveness to enhance workplace performance and community relationships. The organization was best known for its educational events, led by presenters such as Dr. Roosevelt Thomas, Tim Wise, Angela Bassett, Jane Elliott and Lee Mun Wah, as well as its trademarked Chronology of World Cultural Events poster calendar.

Workforce Language Services is sad to see this great community resource go, and wishes everyone involved with MCDC the best in the coming year.

Visit the MCDC at http://www.mcdc.org/.

The NYTimes article “In Job Hunt, College Degree Can’t Close Racial Gap” was a most-emailed article last week. We’ve written about this issue before — job applicants with ethnic-sounding names are having a harder time getting interviews and jobs than their white counterparts, despite being equally qualified.

With the job market in a crunch, applicants are doing everything they can to gain an edge over their competitors. But when highly-qualified African-Americans are changing the way their names appear on their résumés just to get a call back, its obvious that they are facing a more devastating disadvantage.

Johnny R. Williams, 30, would appear to be an unlikely person to have to fret about the impact of race on his job search, with companies like JPMorgan Chase and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago on his résumé.

But after graduating from business school last year and not having much success garnering interviews, he decided to retool his résumé, scrubbing it of any details that might tip off his skin color. His membership, for instance, in the African-American business students association? Deleted.

Another applicant interviewed uses the name Barry J. Sykes instead of the full Barry Jabbar Sykes, even though he’s always gone by Jabbar.

Although discrimination is rarely overt, interviewees report surprised faces on interviewers once they do get their feet in the door, with waned interest after the interviewers see the applicant is not white. Surprisingly, education, which would seem to level the playing field between whites and blacks, has made it more difficult for black job applicants. The unemployment rate for black male applicants with college degrees is twice that of their white peers.

Read the full article and interpretation here.

Nine years ago, over 12,000 Hispanic farmers sought to put an end to discrimination with a class-action lawsuit against the U.S. federal government. To this day, they’re still waiting for a resolution.

Their hope was that the suit would change the way the U.S. Department of Agriculture treats minority farmers. Hispanic farmers with claims against the government petitioned for class-action status, which they have not yet been awarded. Without it, each farmer has to litigate his own case individually, all over the nation.

“It makes no sense from a legal, logical or moral standpoint,” [farmers’ attorney Stephen] Hill said.

“There are lots of farmers who could lose what are otherwise valid claims, and I guess in the governments’ view they see that as money being saved. But saved at an incredible cost of what is equitable and fair.”

Families like the Chavez’s believe they were discriminated against and have lost much of their farm as a result. The family was unable to get low-interest loans from the USDA, and they say that they were discouraged from applying or given misinformation. “It was like they just didn’t want us to have the money,” said Vera Chavez.

The USDA has reported special efforts to promote civil rights and end discriminatory practices. They are reviewing farmers’ complaints by a special task force. Meanwhile, thousands of farmers wait their turn in this drawn-out case.

Click here to read more.