It is no surprise that Hispanics entering the US with limited or no English abilities often end up working in factories across the country. With a limited capacity for communication in English comes a limited set of options for work. Yet factories can be some of the most dangerous places to work in any country, where the ability to read and understand warnings and cautionary signs can mean the difference between health or injury.
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This issue famously came up in mid-2011 in an incident at Tyson Foods, an international corporation with headquarters in Arkansas. The factory incident revolved around a poisonous gas leak that occurred when a worker failed to read the label on a container, pouring a chemical into it that, when mixed with the residue of the chemical previously held in the container, produced chlorine gas. The Center for Disease Control interviewed the worker after the accident, and reported that he said his primary language was Spanish and that he could not understand the label written in English.
While Tyson Foods contests that the argument of the worker in question—claiming instead that his primary language is English and that he simply failed to take note of the label—the case highlights the importance of warning and safety precautions in factories, and the ability of workers to properly understand them. It doesn’t necessarily make sense for companies that run factories and other sites with Hispanic workers to provide language training to all of their employees—in terms of the time and resource investment. So it would seem that providing translations of things such as container labels, warning and hazard signs, etc. would make the most sense.
Another issue that arose in the Tyson Foods case corresponded to the way employees are trained for these potentially dangerous jobs. While the company claims that hands-on training is already practiced in its factories, cases such as this one emphasize why this form of training in the employees’ native language(s) is preferable to video or reading-based training techniques, in which employees may only understand part of the information provided in English, or none at all.
