Contractors seeking language solution

PORTLAND — Oregon has seen a huge jump in foreign-born residents, and the construction industry is seeking ways to make their transition to a new country and job easier.

The 2000 census found that 8.5 percent of Oregonians are foreign-born, compared to 11.1 percent nationally. But Oregon has seen a 108-percent increase in foreign-born citizens from 1990 to 2000.

While the state’s Hispanic population has grown for decades, recent years have seen an influx of Eastern Europeans and forced the industry to adapt.

A bilingual approach that solved some job-site communication problems has a lesser impact now.

“I do know that there is Spanish curriculum out there,” said Dan Graham, a work force director for Associated General Contractors’ Oregon-Columbia Chapter. “However, we hesitate to use it. (Using Spanish curriculum) … doesn’t solve the problem for a non-Hispanic nonnative.

“So, yes, we have quite a few Hispanics in our industry. But once you go down that road, you have an issue. Can you provide this for other populations?”

He says he favors an English-as-a-second-language program that can be adapted to any language.

While ESL programs are widely available at Oregon community colleges, Graham said few trade associations offer them.

Graham and his AGC chapter applied for state grants to fund ESL instruction but the application failed.

But he still wants to pursue ESL. “It’s still on our books, and we do hope to do it,” he said. “We’d like to break new territory. We’d like to be a model.”

At the NECA-IBEW training center in Portland, executive director Ken Fry and others coordinate a minority outreach program that advertises in minority- and women-oriented newspapers and promotes the National Electrical Contractors Association and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers where large numbers of minorities will be present.

While applicants of most apprenticeship programs must pass a test that judges English reading comprehension, ultimately those applicants are accepted based on their skills, not their language capabilities.

Reaching apprentices who aren’t fluent in English is critical, he said. “Once we’ve gone through the effort of bringing someone into the program, we’ll do all we can to help them stay in the program,” he said, adding that the five-year apprentices cost about $30,000 each.

Many foreign-born apprentices have experience in their native country, and while they may struggle with English, their skills are often remarkable, Fry said.

At the Operating Engineers Training Center in Eugene, every Eastern European applicant has access to a translator, training coordinator Quint Rahberger said.

A foreign-born worker with obvious skills was struggling with work, Rahberger said. Instructors realized the lack of success was due to a difficulty mastering the industry’s nomenclature and myriad abbreviations, Rahberger said. The worker began working with a translator.

“And the apprentice is making significant progress, as opposed to when there were misunderstandings that were based on language barriers and the nomenclature,” Rahberger said.