Foreign Languages and Safety Communication

Labor Rights Week, 8/26-30/2024 Announcement from OSHA Quik Takes page

?If you do not get messages from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) about where they are focusing their attention or their current hot topics all you have to do is open the OSHA website, osha.gov , and an opportunity to subscribe will flash open for you within seconds.

?OSHA’s Labor Rights Week announcement follows:

“Labor Rights Week is August 26-30. All workers, regardless of immigration status , have basic rights to safe workplaces , fair wages , and protection from retaliation for speaking up about concerns on the job.”? They provide Services in Multiple Languages to enable computer savvy, literate, non-English or Spanish speaking workers access the phone number where they can register complaints in their own language.? Using the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s website as the place to report inadequate wages is a trifle off brand, but the link goes to the Department of Labor’s website where they will provide an interpreter for such languages as Russian, Tag a Log, Iranian, Polish, Pakistani, etc.?

?The only non-English language I’ve found on the OSHA website, so far, is Spanish.? Even the Quick Takes email includes a Spanish translation:

“Semana de los derechos laborales? La Semana de los Derechos Laborales es del 26 al 30 de Agosto. Todos los trabajadores, independientemente de su estatus migratorio , tienen derechos básicos a lugares de trabajo seguros , salarios justos y protección frente a represalias por expresar sus preocupaciones en el trabajo.”

?Having their main outreach communication in both English and Spanish made me wonder: how accessible are our Safety and Health resources for people who only speak a foreign language, other than Spanish.? Are they influenced by the fear losing a job or even deportation if they confess to not understanding the Safety training or posted warnings and labels?? Should OSHA reconsider focusing on Spanish only speakers considering the record breaking 4.5 million increase in the number of immigrants, legal and illegal in the last 3.5 years, not to mention the steady decline of Mexican and Central American immigrants?? Keep in mind that the portion of foreign-born immigrants, legal and illegal, known to be in the US has reached a record breaking 15%.

?Of those crossing the border illegally, the vast majority are of working age, as seen in the graphic below reporting on border encounters.? I’m going to clarify now, I’m a simple person, if someone breaks a law the act is illegal, so someone who comes to stay in the US, immigrate, by illegal means is an illegal immigrant. ?

The dark blue and pink bars are for illegal immigrants found to be ineligible for immigration who are released into America waiting for their court date.? The blue is for Title 42 authorized 3 million border expulsions in the interests of public health.? The cancellation of Title 42, as indicated on the graph, was in May 2023.? This ended border expulsions for immigrants with health issues, or any other reason.?

Tuberculosis and other diseases without a vaccine are also more prevalent in immigrant source countries than in the US.? Also, many 3rd world countries do not vaccinate for polio, small pox, measles, mumps, and other diseases completely or almost eliminated in the US.? For example, the World Health Organization reported that Afghanistan and Pakistan have endemic Wild Poliovirus and that the majority of countries in Africa have outbreaks of polio variants.? Travelers to these areas are strongly encouraged to have a recent polio vaccine.?

?The working environment creates conditions where diseases can be transferred and spread to the communities outside of the business.? Polio is transmitted through water contaminated with fecal matter.? Flushing the toilet creates an aerosol of contaminated droplets available for inhalation or deposition on surfaces to be transferred to other employee’s hands and transferred to the face or mouth.? This had been identified during the COVID-19 epidemic as a potential transmission source in public restrooms.

Yes, this sounds like it is outside the article’s concentration on language’s impact on safety but there are other illegal immigration impacts to consider on the US’ work environment, especially since Title 42 has ended. ?We are talking about a working population that is often in desperate need of income with a poor education and disease transmission.? Heck, even our health savvy working population had a work ethic of attendance, working through their illness, before COVID education.

?The two years before 2021 the numbers were well below100,000 but started ramping up to just under 100,000 between October of 2020 and January of 2021 after Title 42 ended it jumped to just under 200,000 and only went under that number a few months in the last 2.6 years.?

?Once the requirement to expel illegal immigrants to protect the United State’s health status ended there were no further reported expulsions of immigrants on this graph, all were released into the country to wait for their court date.? Naturally, many of them sought employment.? There is no data on the number of them who could speak and/or read English, and I am having a hard time finding a breakdown of the languages spoken and/or read by the immigrants.

?Language is extremely important for employee Safety.? The National Fire Prevention Association (NFPA) expressly states that their numeric hazard ratings are not applicable to workplace exposures because they only rate the hazards for symptoms that adversely affect an emergency responder while onsite.? This is why a corrosive is rated as 4 and a carcinogen is rated as 3.? HMIS use the same rating system and is also inappropriate to communicate hazard information in the workplace.? Global Harmonized Pictograms are also intended to be used by emergency responders however, the numeric hazard ratings are relevant to workplaces.

?OSHA does not require employers to post signs, have labels, or have Safety Data Sheets in languages other than English.? You can only get so prescriptive when you are regulating over 8 million workplaces and 130 million workers, per OSHA .? We will be leaving out the reported decrease in literacy by graduates in our Federal school system (I have no data on private or charter schools for comparison right now.)

?The number of Mexican and Central American illegal immigrants has been steadily decreasing over the past 10 years since more have been using the H-2A visa for seasonal agricultural work, yet they still remain the largest fraction of illegal immigrants by far, even as the numbers of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries continue to increase from 1.2 million in 2022 due to the poverty and violence endemic in their countries.?

?[Note: the immigrants from these regions have a “higher share of working in management, business, science, and arts occupations.”

“English proficiency varied by country of origin. ?In 2022, 63 % of Yemeni, 47 % of Iraqi, and 45 % of Syrian immigrants reported limited English proficiency, versus 28 % of Jordanian, 30 % of Egyptian, and 32 % of Lebanese immigrants.

In terms of languages spoken at home, 76 % of MENA immigrants spoke either Arabic or the Near East Arabic dialect, while 11 percent reported speaking only English. Speakers of French and Armenian–the next top two languages–accounted for 4 percent and 2 percent of MENA immigrants, respectively.”]?

?So, what language should OSHA be focusing on since the influx of working age immigrants keeps increasing?? In 2023 Migration Policy news provided the following breakdown of 2021’s unauthorized immigrants:

Unfortunately, I was not able to find a similar breakdown for the current 15,717,000 illegal immigrants in the United States.

?Of the current illegal immigrant population, aged 25 years and older, less than 2% have a high school diploma or GED.? About 1% graduated high school, 16% left public school before attending High School than graduated and 15% never attended middle school, 6th grade, or beyond.

?So, apart from the language barrier, how much of our printed safety material (such as Safety Data Sheets and labels) are really accessible to all of our workers?

?Ah Ha!? I found a source that may shed some light on how many of our workers can understand the Safety information OSHA requires us to present, only in English.? According to Migration Policy the immigrant population over 5 years old speak…Argh!! ?Never mind, it only tracks language spoken at home, not proficiency in the English language outside of the home, such as the workplace.? Let alone literacy.? The first generation born in, or brought to America before the age of three, have a better chance at literacy as 89% of them are enrolled in public or private school systems.

?I’ve inspected or had clients with employees who do not speak English and there is usually a Supervisor or fellow employee around to interpret for them.? I find this particularly frustrating when I’m conducting air or noise sampling because the apparent default answer is “Yes”.? For example, “Was this a representative workday for noise exposure?? Yes! (smile, bow the head).”? I’m not even sure if I should note that down.? Are they telling me what they think I want to hear, or what the employer would want them to say?? There’s no way to know.? Plus, is the interpreter posing the question, or the answer, correctly?

?Is this important?? Yes, definitely!? If it is a high exposure workday and the exposure comes in under the limit then it is likely they are always under the limit.? If it is a low exposure workday and they are close to the limit then sampling should be conducted again on a normal workday because they may be over the exposure limit.

?So, I’ve purchased a lifetime subscription to Rosetta Stone and spending about half an hour a day working with it.? I’ve been at it all summer and I’m up to 8 pages of words I am familiar with but not necessarily ready to ask an employee “Su jornada laboral era normal?”? If not “Si, normal” the next question has to be “Por Que?” basically why? And beyond that I’m at a loss but I’ll keep at it because information from the source is more accurate.

?In the interim, I’ll keep sitting down with the interpreter(s) and explaining why accuracy is important to their co-worker’s health and safety.? Which they will balance against their fear of unemployment.

?Well, this started out as a 4 paragraph sidebar to a partially researched article but it just kept getting more interesting.? My old business partner kept telling me I get too in depth on the blogs I was writing, which should not have foot notes or sources.? Thanks for putting up with this spur of the moment article that probably restated the facts a tad too much.

Postscript, if you will pardon the pun. I just watched Sound of Freedom, it is now on Amazon Prime for free, and it was well cast, scripted, acted and produced but very hard, emotionally, to watch. It is something I think everyone should see.

According to a Women in Business meeting last year: Wisconsin, where I live, has been called one of the highest Human Trafficking states in America. Sound of Freedom is about Human Trafficking but it is all comfortably outside of the United States. Until you read the information posted at the end of the movie.

The United States has the highest incidence of Human Trafficking in the world. Human Trafficking is a 150 Billion Dollar industry. Humans are trafficked for labor and for sex. Many of the humans trafficked are children, kidnapped or sent to a "better life" by their families. The US is "one of the top destinations for Human Trafficking and among the largest consumers of child sex."

When people say that the border issue is a Human Rights issue, they often mean the border should be open. They are right, whether the border should be open or closed is a Human Rights issue, open borders make the United States an extremely inviting source and sales place for Human Traffickers. Yes, the movie focused on children from impoverished countries, but US children are also being trafficked, removed from their homes and our country.

Slavery is in the public eye a LOT in the US, but it is talked about as if it's all in the past. If we really are against Slavery, we start by acknowledging that there are more humans in Slavery today than at any other time in history, including when Slavery was legal, not just in the US but around the world.