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€