Does Hispanic oriented safety training impact current construction industry safety rates

Construction is an industry of risk, both physical and economical. Any and all occurrences can have implications on both these factors. One of the largest issues over the last years that has affected both these areas is construction safety. Labor accidents and illness can have a major impact on a company\u27s bottom line and on their labor\u27s ability to provide for their family. Hispanic labor over the years has been the fastest growing ethnicity and has had the highest injury rates in the construction industry. Cultural and language differences have caused this workforce to have a communication gap between them and English speaking US management. Understanding the cultural and language differences can help construction management to better communicate and at the same time create safety training programs oriented towards this workforce with the final goal of lowering accidents. The purpose of the present study was to investigate what industry is implementing in regards to Hispanic oriented safety training programs and determine if what they do, impacts their incidence rate. A sample pool from companies that participated in the Purdue Building Construction Management department fall 2012 career fair were contacted and asked to participate. A survey of twenty-four questions was created and sent to these companies, that requested demographic information, recordable injuries and illnesses, total employee hours worked, and Hispanic oriented safety training questions. With these answers an incidence rate and training score were calculated. These values were statistically compared using Pearson Product Moment Correlation to see if the training score impacted the incidence rate. Results showed that the company training score did not have a significant correlation with the incidence rate thus indicating that what participants were implementing in Hispanic oriented training programs was not having an impact in their incidence rates