OSHA states that if your employees receive job instructions in any other language besides English then the training and information to be conveyed under the hazard communication standard will also need to be communicated in a foreign language. A memorandum released in 2010 confirms that training must be understood by the end user, compliance officers are asked to verify that the employee was trained in a manner that allowed the employee to fully understand the material. That would help us deduce that training in Spanish is something all Safety and Health professionals must encounter and deliver in order to be in compliance. An interesting fact is that the United States does not have an "official language", although the majority of the population speaks American English, that's over 300 million people! However, in second place there is Spanish. A record 37.6 million persons ages 5 years and older speak Spanish at home, according to an analysis of the 2011 American Community Survey by the Pew Research Center. In the workforce there are large portions who speak Spanish, according to the Department of Labor nearly 23 million, people of Hispanic or Latino ethnicity represented 15 percent of the U.S. labor force in 2011. By 2020, Latinos are expected to comprise 19 percent of the U.S. labor force. However, this doesn't mean that all 23 million people cannot understand some level of English. Hence the introduction of Spanglish!
Spanglish has been invading the traditional Spanish language for centuries, when the US purchased California, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado and Texas from Mexico, which left Mexican citizens in the US already speaking Spanish. In the 19th century we saw the first Spanglish words emerge, words like buckaroo (vaquero), bandolier, barbecue, bronco and others of the sort. Fast forward to the mid-20th century when Mexican immigrants started coming over as part of the Bracero movement, suddenly there is a flood of Spanish speaking employees. This leads to the first official encounter where English speaking bosses needed to communicate with Spanish speaking employees. Some of the first words learned by these employees were boss, quick, pick, but then the bosses started learning some Spanish as well, things like pronto, ven, arriba started popping up in the boss's lexicon. In the east coast we see an influx of Puerto Ricans into New York and surrounding townships. They too start assimilating the language and coming up with their own lexicon, for example Loisa, that's East Lower East Side. If you encounter someone who speaks Spanish is NYC and ask them for Loisa that's where you will end up. Now the problem isn't that Spanglish is bad, the problem is that it isn't always universal. It's a form of a dialect that has a grassroots movement, very localized to the area where it was born and its parents.
