One in three construction workers is Hispanic. Is your safety training reaching all of them?
Hispanic construction workers now make up over a third of the industry's workforce -- and their fatality rate has climbed for over a decade while it's fallen for everyone else.
Why the gap keeps widening
Hispanic share of the U.S. construction workforce
34.0% in 2023, up from 16.5% in 2000
[CPWR, Dec 2024]Growth in Hispanic worker fatalities, 2011-2022
+107.1%, vs +16.5% for non-Hispanic workers
[CPWR, Dec 2024]Fatal injury rate trend, 2011-2022
+7.3% for Hispanic workers vs -1.1% for non-Hispanic workers
[CPWR, Dec 2024]Nonfatal injury rate (days of job transfer/restriction)
1.6x higher for Hispanic workers -- 35.9 vs 21.9 per 10,000 FTEs
[CPWR, Dec 2024]Researchers point to the same root cause again and again: safety material written in English, then translated as an afterthought, doesn't reach workers the way it needs to. There's often a lack of training material available in Spanish, and fewer safety programs available at smaller construction businesses.
Safety Talk TV sends every safety talk video in English and Spanish, automatically, to every worker's phone -- not a translated PDF nobody opens, but the same text, in the language each worker actually reads. No app, no login, no separate bilingual program to manage.