30 April 2008
Andrea Oates

In January, officers from the Gangmasters Licensing Authority questioned 80 migrant vegetable pickers in Cornwall and found, among other things, that they were being paid below the minimum wage and illegally charged for gloves and other protective equipment by the gangmasters who rented them out.

This was just the latest in a string of events spotlighting the insecurity of migrant workers that had as its worst example the deaths of 21 Chinese cockle pickers who drowned in Morecambe Bay in 2004.

The nature of their employment means migrants directed by gangmasters often live a precarious existence despite the efforts of the authorities, but those directly employed are not always so much better off. When the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health surveyed food and drink manufacturers, half the respondents said their health and safety policies did not address how non-English-speaking employees were informed, instructed or trained in health and safety.

Asked about the rise in injuries on construction sites last year, HSE chief inspector of construction Stephen Williams said that there was anecdotal evidence of more accidents involving workers from abroad. The lack of adequate training and instruction for migrants is an increasingly common factor in health and safety prosecutions. 

In the past 12 months, HSE prosecutions involving migrant workers' safety have included the following cases:

• In August 2007 a Bradford judge ordered construction site boss Shah Nawaz Pola to pay £90,000 compensation to a severely injured Slovakian worker who suffered near-fatal injuries after he was hit in the head by a concrete lintel. Dusan Dudi was one of several migrants paid £30 a day to work on a house extension project with no proper scaffolding, personal protective equipment or training. Pola was also jailed for six months.
• In September, Sheffield-based RMS Construction was fined £3500 plus £910 costs for sending three Polish workers to clean a fragile roof with no protection. One of the men had never been on a roof before and none of the men spoke English. The prosecuting inspector said the firm had placed the men "in danger of death".
• In December, a construction company director landed penalties totalling £250,00 after Pawel Szczotka suffered multiple fractures and was left confined to a wheelchair when a two-tonne floor slab fell on him. Szczotka and fellow Poles had no safety training or construction experience before working on the north London site. His employer failed to report the accident and initially denied it had happened. 

Research commissioned by the HSE in 2006 found that migrant workers were especially vulnerable because of the short periods they spent working in the UK; poor knowledge of the health and safety system here; and limited access to safety training and advice coupled with trouble understanding what little was offered.

Lingua franca

But a handful of employers, often working together with unions, are finding that breaking down the language barrier goes a long way to helping them discharge their duty of care to protect migrant workers.

Gunstones Bakery in Sheffield, part of the Northern Foods Group, has a workforce of around 1000, 30% of whom are migrants. It also uses up to 100 agency workers (mainly migrant workers) to cope with peaks in demand. There are now 23 languages spoken at the company, with workers from Russia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Romania, for example, joining the Urdu and Punjabi speakers who have been with the company for 10 or even 20 years.

Gunstones' HR manager Elaine Neale says that with so many native tongues, it's not practicable to produce company health and safety information in all of them, though the company does display general health and safety information in as many as possible, downloaded from the HSE website, around the canteen.

Instead, she says, pictures are bridging the language gap: "We've developed pictorial documents in order to get across information about the greatest health and safety risks and we use these to carry out health and safety induction training for agency workers, who we target particularly for health and safety training because they're often new to the organisation."

The company uses these pictorial documents to warn workers about slips, trips and falls, including "clean-as-you-go" messages and advice on wearing the right type of non-slip footwear, and when to use emergency stop buttons, as it found that some workers were not aware of their function and were using them for non-emergencies.

 

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Under-protected and over here

The sudden rise in economic migrant numbers here after the accession of the eight new eastern and central European states in 2004 brought the HSE up against the fact there was almost no research on the health and safety implications of such an influx. So it commissioned the Working Lives Research Institute at London Metropolitan University to interview 200 migrant workers and more than 60 employers.

The interviewees were mostly in the 20 to 40 age-group and many came from the central and eastern European states such as Poland, Estonia and the Czech Republic, whose nationals have been able to travel here freely to work since 2004. Only half spoke good English.

The study found:

• One in four migrant workers had suffered an accident working here or witnessed one involving a fellow migrant. They said they would not report accidents because they feared they might be dismissed or even deported.
• Few employers checked migrant workers had the skills and qualifications for the work they were doing. "Even in cases where workers were performing skilled and potentially dangerous work, like scaffolding, work was being offered to individuals who had no previous experience in the task," the authors say. They found migrant workers handling food with no knowledge of the steps needed to avoid contamination.
• More than a third of the migrants interviewed had not received any training in health and safety and for the remaining two-thirds the training that had been offered was generally limited to a short session at induction.
• Where workers were supplied by an agency, they found confusion over who was responsible for their health and safety and training - the agency or the client.
• Migrants in some sectors, such as hotels and catering and processing and packing, were working in excess of 60 hours a week and some had more than one job. The study points out that many migrants come to the UK to earn money as fast as possible, so they will work very long hours, especially if wages are low.
• Workers were often unaware of their right under the Working Time Regulations to take work breaks and employers often did not provide them or did so at times that were unfamiliar to migrants used to a different work pattern, with the result that they kept on working.

The report, RR502: Migrant Workers in England and Wales: An Assessment of Migrant Worker Health and Safety Risks, is free to download here.

 

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First things

Transport operator First has also looked at, and then rejected, translating health and safety information for migrant workers in its Manchester bus operation, but Stuart Smith, project worker - lifelong learning, explained: "There are different schools of thought within the safety profession regarding the use of translated safety information.

First in Manchester have risk assessed the translation option and decided it's much safer, and socially responsible, to provide quality and meaningful training for all staff. While some might be tempted to translate safety information into the language of the majority, such as Polish and Urdu, what about the one Lithuanian in the workforce?"

"You can't necessarily assume that people are literate in their first language," adds Les Perkins, regional education officer at the public services union Unison in London, which has been involved in commissioning workplace-based English as a Second Language (ESOL) training in partnership with employers for around eight years.

First in Manchester employs around 2400 staff, of whom 1800 are bus drivers and 5% are migrant workers mainly from Eastern Europe, and it has gone down the route of providing language training. It recognised that to work safely and comfortably, some of its staff needed additional English training, and it provides free ESOL training for its staff, and pays them to attend weekly sessions at its Manchester and Oldham learner centres.

The training incorporates many health and safety elements. For example, the classroom aspects of bus driver training, which is becoming increasingly technical, have been adapted and are used as ESOL materials. The lessons focus initially on the safety-critical aspects of the drivers' work, such as "first user checks": comprehensive daily vehicle checks, to ensure that a bus is clean, tidy and roadworthy before it leaves the depot.

Technical vocab

Trainers also build in role-play activities, which were developed to give learners the ability and confidence to discuss potential defects with engineering staff.

"Although we were confident that all our drivers have the technical language ability to pass the UK PCV Test (Theory and Practice) we didn't want anyone to ignore a minor defect because of a confidence issue," says Smith. "Additional role-play activities were developed to give drivers the ability and confidence to use the bus radio system - crucial to the safe and efficient provision of public transport."

The migrants learn the Highway Code and the vocabulary associated with a vehicle safety check: emergency doors, upper saloon, lower saloon, bells, fire extinguishers, interior lights, and so on.

At one point, the company was providing four lots of two-hour classes each week, timed to fit in with training and driver schedules. Cleaners, shunters and engineers have also been through ESOL classes, and the company makes lifelong learning opportunities available to the partners of its employees.

Gunstones also provides ESOL training, with paid release for those attending 30-hour courses at Chesterfield College, which also has health and safety elements.

"Instead of just learning how to say good morning and good afternoon, employees learn how to ask for help, understand basic instructions and the role of their managers, know where the fire exits are, for example, and understand the greatest risks involved in the work," says Neale.

Go-betweens

Gunstones uses interpreters where necessary, mainly for communicating with its Urdu and Punjabi speakers. Roger Bibbings, occupational safety adviser at safety campaigners RoSPA, says, "Research has highlighted the critical role of multilingual supervisors - people with two or more languages who have a competent role in supervision - as a means of communicating health and safety information to people lacking English skills. The research shows that they would benefit from health and safety training."

Neale cautions it's important to use independently assessed interpreters. "Just because someone speaks English well, it does not necessarily mean that they are a good interpreter," she says.

Gunstones has had the support of the Regional Language Network Yorkshire and Humber (RLN YH), an independent organisation and one of nine regional projects set up to promote communication, language and cultural awareness skills and help employers develop them. For example, with RLN YH, Gunstones has looked at why some groups of workers who may have worked for the company for up to 20 years have not felt the need to learn English and tried to identify whether it can work with local groups in the area to provide language training opportunities.

The firm also runs diversity training for managers and supervisors which has tackled the issue of speaking with a Sheffield dialect. "We found that migrant workers who were learning standard English and then being confronted with a regional dialect were getting frustrated because they couldn't understand what was being said to them," Neale explains. "And those speaking with a strong dialect were getting frustrated at not being understood."

Categories:
Safety, Article, Migrant workers

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