Breaking New Ground with Bilingual Worker Training Materials: Lead's Revenge! °La Venganza del Plomo!

A critical means toward the goal of achieving social justice in our society is that educational materials about workplace health and safety be understandable to the worker(s) they are designed to reach. Development of such materials is often attempted through lowering the literacy level of written materials, adding some large headings and graphics and hoping the audience will understand and act. Videos/DVDs are often done in a didactic “talking heads” style with a few awkward job site cutaways that don't look like any jobsite the audience has ever experienced. In the award winning video, Lead's Revenge! °La Venganza del Plomo!, the Occupational Lead Program/Occupational Health Branch, CA Dept. of Public Health, and the producer/director attempted to break new ground by producing an innovative educational tool that would be understandable and motivational to both native English speakers and to Spanish-speaking immigrant painters and other construction workers. They also wanted to create a training tool that contractors would want to utilize. By creating a non-translated, non-subtitled film that can be understood, they produced a film that provides a template for a new approach to worker training in mixed workplaces. This panel will consist of three fifteen-minute presentations, exploring the challenges and success of this approach to worker safety materials. A showing of the seventeen-minute video will follow the first presentation and come before the next two. We will close with a thirty-minute audience discussion regarding the strengths and weaknesses of the approach, the challenges and opportunities and future directions.