Health and safety training following hurricane Sandy: An evaluation of the use of community organizations to enhance training capacity for vulnerable workers

Following the devastation of hurricane Sandy, immigrant day laborers provided much of the post-disaster clean-up support in the affected areas of New York and New Jersey.  Due to a shortage of qualified bilingual trainers, the immigrant day laborers did not receive critical health and safety training needed to adequately prepare them to safely participate in clean-up activities.  To resolve the bottleneck of untrained workers, the United Steel Workers (USW) collaborated with several community organizations in New York and New Jersey in an attempt to create a cadre of bilingual trainers to provide health and safety training (i.e., OSHA-10 hour construction worker health and safety training), with an emphasis on Spanish-speaking trainers.  The present study highlights an evaluation directed at assessing the community organizations proposed solutions to meeting the workforce demand for OSHA-10 training in Spanish and to determine how effective they were in meeting such demands.   Qualitative and quantitative data were analyzed and synthesized across stakeholders to provide evidence of the extent to which the community organizations increased their organizational capacity (build infrastructure to provide training to meet day laborers needs) and increased workforce capacity (decreased the backlog of untrained workers).   The results of the present study provide best practices and lessons learned in building training capacity following hurricane Sandy.  The implications of these results will be discussed with respect to designing, delivering, and evaluating health and safety training programs in disaster response and recovery and guiding subsequent policy development.