Asbury Park Press, NJ

Asbury Park Press, NJ 06-26-06

Language troubles can be deadly

BY WILLIAM PETROSKI GANNETT NEWS SERVICE

Antonio Garcia spends winters in his native Mexico. The rest of the year, he works in Iowa, laying concrete for Manatt's Inc., one of Iowa's biggest construction companies.

Speaking in Spanish, Garcia explained that he likes Manatt's and makes good money. When asked how much he talks with his English-speaking supervisors, he said, "Poquito," meaning very little. Mostly, Garcia relies upon bilingual co- workers to translate for him.

Now, some of Garcia's American supervisors are learning Spanish to improve job safety for Latino construction workers, who have higher-than-average rates for on-the-job accidents and fatalities nationwide. Spanish-speaking construction workers can take a similar survival course in English.

"I am not fluent in Spanish by any means, but every year I get a little better," said Matt Triggs, a concrete superintendent for Manatt's who has participated in the program. "I want our guys to know that I respect them. When we put a good effort into it, they will help us learn and they will learn English themselves."

The Iowa Department of Transportation has provided about $270,000 to Iowa State University's Center for Transportation Education and Research to develop and provide training aimed at overcoming language barriers in the construction industry. ISU researchers surveyed American supervisors and Latino craft workers at more than a dozen Iowa construction companies.

Their study found that language differences affect workplace safety and productivity. In addition, most Latino laborers have less than a high school education and may not have the literacy skills needed to understand training materials.

A survey by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that in 2003, 791 Latino workers were fatally injured in all types of workplaces nationwide. The rate of 4.5 percent fatalities per 100,000 workers for Latinos was 13 percent higher than the rate for all workers.

The construction industry, which uses heavy machinery in often-difficult working conditions, had the highest number of work-related fatalities among all industry sectors. Engineering professor Edward Jaselskis, a principal investigator for the ISU study, said the initial phase of his work at ISU was aimed at teaching Latino workers about Iowa's culture and language.

"Then, we realized that, in order for this integration to work, we had to work with American supervisors, to teach them a little bit of Spanish and to continue working with Hispanics and to teach them 'survival English,' " Jaselskis said.

It's common that Spanish-speaking construction workers who take the classes quickly figure out safety problems that they didn't understand previously but that English-speaking supervisors took for granted, said Fernando Aveiga, an ISU graduate student from Quito, Ecuador, who has been a training instructor.

Manatt's crew includes some Latinos who speak English well, such as Ricardo Mora, 30, originally from Guadalajara, Mexico, who has lived in Marshalltown since 1992. These bilingual workers particularly assist Spanish-speaking workers who come to Iowa from Mexico each spring to work on construction jobs.

When he is with co-workers from Mexico, "I am definitely speaking Spanish," he said. But when he has an American supervisor next to him, he sticks with English.

When he first came to the United States, he said, he spoke only Spanish.

"But I am the kind of person who thinks that if I am going to live here, I have to learn the language. So, I went to school and learned English," Mora said.