Thread: English-only workplace rules divide lawmakers

House, Senate split over making it illegal to fire non-English speakers

updated 11 minutes ago
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21824806/

WASHINGTON - A government suit against the Salvation Army has the House and Senate at loggerheads over whether to nullify a law that prohibits employers from firing people who don’t speak English on the job.

The fight illustrates the explosiveness of immigration as an issue in the 2008 elections.

Republicans on Capitol Hill are pushing hard to protect employers who require their workers to speak English, but Democratic leaders have blocked the move despite narrow vote tallies in the GOP’s favor.

For more than 30 years, federal rules have generally barred employers from establishing English-only requirements for their workers.

But in a demonstration of the explosiveness of the immigration issue, Senate Republicans have won passage of legislation preventing the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from enforcing the rules against English-only workplaces.

House Democratic leaders, meanwhile, have promised Hispanic lawmakers that the language issue is a nonstarter and the resulting impasse has stalled the underlying budget bill, which lawmakers had hoped to send to President Bush this week.

The EEOC has come under assault from lawmakers such as Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., after the agency filed suit earlier this year against a Salvation Army thrift store in Massachusetts that had fired two Hispanic employees for speaking Spanish while sorting clothes.

Stemmed from 1964 Civil Rights Act
Supporters of the EEOC regulation — which can be waived if there is a legitimate business or safety purpose to require English — say it protects workers from discrimination based on their national origin. The rules have their legal origin in the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

“I cannot imagine that the framers of the 1964 Civil Rights Act intended to say that it’s discrimination for a shoe shop owner to say to his or her employee, ’I want you to be able to speak America’s common language on the job,â€

You find a lot of these Spanish speakers who are legal are a result of the last amnesties. They still can't speak English. There is no reason to learn. It's been made too easy for them and you can't expect any future ones to learn either.

I think when they wrote that equal opportuinity law they didn't mean equal language opportunity. When they wrote that we didn't have over 100 different languages in the workplace. In order for things to go smoothly in the work place it will most likely occurr when people understand one another.

I'm sorry, I just don' t believe SA fired these women who had supposedly been good workers for 5 years, just because they were speaking Spanish to each other.

That sounds like hogwash to me.

I think all people who work with others should speak English. It is disguisting when people come up to you and speak a foreign language. In South Florida many people immediately start speaking Spanish to you especially if you look like you might be. My daughter gets it all the time as they think she is Cuban.

I'm sorry, I just don' t believe SA fired these women who had supposedly been good workers for 5 years, just because they were speaking Spanish to each other.

The EEOC has taken the cases way to far, worse then that is that courts like the 9th circuit have turned so liberal on these cases that they seem to be reversing themselves then saying they aren't reversing themselves. Its very confusing to employers.

If I still worked, I would have to have fun with this.

1.) Make up enough of a language (lets call it "work") to just have a few meaningless conversations with friends at work.

2.) When other employees that used "thier" language around others were around, start talking with your friends in the new "work" language.

3.) laugh, giggle, like some kind of secret is being talked about

4.) see what happens

If you did that then you would see how rude they are. My daughter and I speak 2 other languages besides English and when we hear Spanish in public we stop speaking English. We have gotten many dirty looks by them for that. One day we had 2 women screaming in Spanish at the table behind us at Starbucks so we began speaking in one of our languages. When they were leaving one of them actually stopped in front of us and told us we were rude. I looked at her and replied: "I was only doing what you were doing .... speaking my first language." She walked away angry. I really feel sorry when the French Canadians come down for the winter and have to deal with the dirty looks they get from the Spanish speakers when they speak French among themselves.