January 10, 2005—Concern that migrant workers in the UK could be missing out on crucial health and safety training because their employers are not providing safety material in any language other than English has prompted the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and the Trades Union Congress (TUC) to produce new safety information translated into 21 different languages.
“Your health, your safety: A guide for workers” provides information about safety rights at work, the level of safety training that workers should expect from their employers, and who they should complain to if they believe their safety is being compromised by poor workplace practices.
The new information is published in Albanian, Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Czech, Greek, Gujarati, Lithuanian, Pashto, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Tamil, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, and Welsh, as well as English.
Union learning representatives from construction union UCATT have been helping migrant workers who speak only a few words of English improve their safety awareness by running basic language courses in a learning center at the foot of the Canary Wharf Tower. The center has proved very popular with the workers—who are mainly from Eastern Europe—and the representatives say that a basic grasp of English can literally mean the difference between life and death for the workers on site.
