Safety training for newcomers fraught with challenges

Getting new employees up to speed on safety in the workplace is of course of paramount importance to employers.

But when those workers happen to be newcomers to Canada, the challenges are much more serious, according to a new study.

For one, immigrants often gravitate towards jobs that are more safety-sensitive and at smaller employers.

“In terms of language support, language capacity, especially around safety training, larger businesses had more in terms of providing safety training and translating some of those safety training materials,” says Basak Yanar, Institute for Work & Health (IWH) associate scientist and lead author of the paper published in the November issue of Safety Science.

“However, mostly small businesses and some medium businesses shared that they did not have enough resources for translation of materials.”

The study, “Employers’ experiences with safe work integration of recent immigrants and refugees,” heard from 35 employer representatives, 21 service providers and five other persons about their experiences offering education to newcomers. It was co-authored by Kay Nasir, Amani Massoud, Sibghat Usmani, Stephanie Premji and Peter Smith.

Size matters

In addition to having more opportunities to provide language translations, smaller employers are disadvantaged in terms of who often manages the training.

“Of course, larger businesses had more of an HR capacity; they tend to have a person who has a health and safety responsibility and they had more streamlined, robust training programs, where smaller businesses tend to have more informal means of training, and that sometimes really does fall on, for example, the owner of the business,” says Yanar.

With Canada’s recent announcements around bringing in more workers from aboard, this type of problem will only grow in importance, she says, so employers and government should become more aware.

“We know that there are labour shortages in many industries right now so new immigrants and refugees are going to be one key resource.”

Another study conducted earlier this year by Angus Reid and Threads of Life, a group that promotes safe workplaces, found that almost 20 per cent of businesses have no safety programs for new Canadians, despite laws mandating this requirement.

The role of DEI

For those employers who wish to continue hiring immigrants but are concerned about safety challenges, perhaps a new way of looking at diversity might help, according to Yanar.

“It would be important to think about diversity in terms of health and safety so providing safety training and safety information and also considering the background of the newcomer workers, their past experience, around whether they are very new to the job and they may not know safety information, or they may have a very different background in terms of how safety is practised.”

In some cases, the issues might be multiplied due to newcomer fears about speaking up.

“We know that immigrant workers, newcomer worker tended not to speak up and talk about the safety issues that they face and there are many reasons for that. For example, one of them is they might be afraid that they would lose their jobs, or they wanted to prove themselves,” says Yanar.

Employers would do well by “not expecting workers to come and speak to them but [instead] creating an environment, a really culturally sensitive environment, to have newcomers safely speak,” she says.

Some employers might also be unwittingly contributing to this problem with incentive-based practices.

“It could be related to employers putting an emphasis on quota systems or productivity where a newcomer really wanted to prove themselves and then they may decide to cut corners because they want to perform,” says Yanar.

The federal government recently added new job classifications to the National Occupational Classification (NOC) which will boost the Express Entry program.

Government responsibility

Some organizations reported using tools such as Google Translate, which is free, says Yanar, but “it wasn’t an ideal platform, obviously.”

Governments could help by “providing incentives to cover some costs, or it could be actually providing training to employers to have more of a robust occupational health and safety training,” she says.

Health and safety associations, the WSIB and the ministry of labour all have various resources that might prove worthwhile but “one of the things that we found in our study was, although there are resources, they may not be readily available to employers, or they may not know that it exists,” says Yanar.

Overall, there are “system-wide” challenges around resources, language, awareness and culture when it comes to safety, she says, but “hopefully different parties can come together and have a better understanding of the issue and resources related to that.”