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Best Practices Front Page |
NIEHS/OSHA Joint Grantee Workshop April 17-19, 2001 Page 29
Best Practices for Worker Training
Final Report May, 2001
effectively reach that target audience and achieve positive post-training outcomes
required that the community become involved as a partner in the program. The grantee,
however, had the burden of developing that community relationship. The program,
therefore, involved a number of community outreach activities leading to the
development and nurturing of an effective community based organizations partnership.
Following the outreach effort, a community based recruitment activity was undertaken to
reach prospective trainees. As these perspective trainees often lacked skills or experience
in the construction crafts and may not have a GED or diploma, unique approaches were
developed to counsel, mentor, screen, evaluate, and develop a commitment to the training
program and the opportunities such could provide to the individuals future. Upon
successful completion of training, assistance in job placement was undertaken. It was
noted that while it is often difficult in the large east coast cities to get into the building
trades unions, the graduates of this program have been among the first accepted where
openings arise.
Training & Outreach to Multi-cultural Populations (Hispanic and others)
Betty Szudy (OSHA/Coordinator—Hazardous Waste Worker Training Project, Labor
Occupational Health Program/California Arizona Consortium)
Best practices:
Identification of learning difficulties based upon language
barriers and developing solutions to overcome those barriers.
Latinos risk life and limb to work in unsafe U.S. factories and face a higher job-injury
risk. Yet immigrant workers often have less training than other workers because it is not
available in their native language. There is increasing interest among NIEHS and OSHA
grantees in developing effective outreach and training programs in languages other than
English. Over the past ten years, the Labor Occupational Health Program at UC Berkeley
has developed an effective outreach and training program targeted towards Spanish-
speaking workers. This presentation focused on how these programs were developed,
what worked, challenges that were faced, and the lessons learned.
The Labor Occupational Health Program (LOHP) at UC Berkeley is a member of the
California Arizona Consortium, an NIEHS grantee. In 1990, the LOPC received
supplemental funding from NIEHS to develop Spanish language outreach, training, and
materials. In approaching these objectives, LOHP focused on three specific objectives:
Health and Safety Knowledge and Skills, Outreach to promote the program and reach
workers, and approaches to impact the workplace/policy. As these objectives were
pursued, important knowledge emerged. For example:
1. Increasing Health and Safety Knowledge:
·
Development of training in another language takes time and a major
commitment.
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