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Safety is serious business on a construction jobsite. Roorda says when it comes to safety, American and Spanish-speaking workers have different motivations to practice on-the-job safety, and knowing these differences will allow supervisors to help workers to realize safety's importance. "It took this country a long time as a culture to understand safety, and building that safety culture was hard," he says. "Then to bring in another culture can be very difficult."

Roorda explains that American society is very individualistic - many Americans believe that their actions determine their own fate. But Mexican society is a medium to high collectivism culture, meaning people believe that if they take care of their group, their group will take care of them. Roorda says that while supervisors convey a need for on-the-job safety to American workers by emphasizing personal health and safety, they should convey to their Spanish-speaking workers that they need to practice on-the-job safety for the sake of their families and the construction crew.

Bridging the language barrier
Understanding and respecting cultural differences can help create a productive and harmonious working environment, and effective jobsite communication can help to better that environment in many ways. Community language classes and Spanish-to-English/English-to-Spanish dictionaries are widely available to most people, but they're not necessarily the most effective paths to learning English skills that are useful on a construction site. Construction-specific Spanish-language resources are available through many concrete and construction industry associations, including manuals, safety guides, training DVDs, and vocabulary and phrase books. There are companies, such as Zerah Services and 2nd Language Success, that offer construction-specific language courses, translation assistance and other cross-cultural communication services. Additionally, there are several language products geared specifically to the construction industry that teach users vocabulary commonly used on the work site.

When an English speaker and a non-English speaker have something to say to one another on the jobsite, there isn't always time to run back to the office for a translation dictionary. For times when communication needs are immediate, 2nd Language Success has developed a series of portable, laminated vocabulary cards fine-tuned to both the concrete industry and the construction industry in general.

Deby Jones, founder of 2nd Language Success, explains that the "Spanish In-a-Pinch" and "English In-a-Pinch" products use a unique approach to help people communicate even if they have no experience in speaking a foreign language. "The Spanish In-a-Pinch cards are like a cheat sheet for learning Spanish," she says. "They offer the user English words to best pronounce the Spanish."