Thread: Demand Grows for Spanish-Speaking Employees

http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2005/08 ... 8_6_05.txt
Last modified Saturday, August 6, 2005 11:59 PM PDT


Demand grows for Spanish-speaking employees
By: WILLIAM FINN BENNETT - Staff Writer

NORTH COUNTY ---- Life is good for Oscar Negrete, a 26-year-old car salesman at Toyota of Escondido. He's making $6,000 to $7,000 per month in sales commissions, driving a new car, and he and his wife may soon be buying a half-million-dollar home in Temecula, he said. And once they have settled in, they are planning on having children, he added.

Negrete started selling cars at the dealership a year and a half ago. Before that, his job was washing, waxing, vacuuming cars there and he earned $1,800 a month, he said.

So how was he able to snag such a big promotion?


"The number one reason was I speak Spanish." Negrete said Friday. "When I started working as a salesman, the sales manager didn't have a Spanish-speaking salesman on his team at all."

Some North County businesses and cities are waking up to the fact that bilingual employees are often a must to attend the increasing number of their customers who are Latino, many of whom have not yet mastered English or simply feel more comfortable speaking in their native language, several business executives and city officials said this week.

To meet that need, some private and governmental organizations are doing everything from actively recruiting bilingual employees and offering salary incentives to Spanish speakers, to paying for Spanish classes and cultural sensitivity training for their workers.

"Our recruitment of bilingual employees has gone up by close to 60 percent," said Mitch Goldberg, branch manager for Command Staffing and Labor, a Vista-based recruiting firm.

The company provides workers for both clerical and light industry jobs. He said that many of the light industry companies he recruits for have a predominantly Spanish-speaking work force, so there is a great demand for supervisors who speak the language.

"I have sent out workers who don't speak Spanish, and they can't work at (some of) those companies," Goldberg said.

For clerical positions, he said the demand is so great that entry-level positions are paying $3 to $4 an hour more for bilingual workers.

"Any time someone is going to be answering the phone nowadays, they want them to be bilingual," he said.

The 2000 U.S. Census reported that 32.7 percent of the state's population is Latino. In North County, three cities surpassed that number, according to the same census report: Vista, 38.9 percent; San Marcos, 36.8 percent; and Escondido, 38.7 percent. While many local Latinos speak English fluently and some speak little if any Spanish, 524,000 of the county's 671,000 Latino residents speak Spanish at home, according to the census.

And over the next two decades the number of Latinos in the state is expected to reach nearly 50 percent of the population, according to a recent study published by the Public Policy Institute of California.

The local real estate industry has seen a huge spike in Latino home-buyers, said Steve Bradford a broker with Vista-based Century 21 Gieseler-Bradford. He said the numbers first began to rise about six years ago.

"In North County, about 20 to 25 percent of first-time buyers are Hispanic, if not more," Bradford said.

To meet that need, he is hiring more and more Spanish-speaking agents. Today, he has six Spanish-speaking real estate agents and would like to have more, he added.

"It's a tremendous asset to be bilingual," he said. "If someone wants to do well in the real estate community, they had better consider a way to learn to speak Spanish or get an assistant who does, because it's going to be something we see long into the future."

He added that the need for bilingual employees extends into all phases of the real estate business: mortgage companies, title companies and home-inspection companies.

Berlitz International Inc. is a worldwide language school. The company has a branch in San Diego and conducts on-site language training at companies and government offices around the county.

"In Southern California and San Diego and the North County area in particular, we have seen about a 45 percent increase in Spanish lessons (in the past few years,)" said Tom Godfrey, a regional manager with Berlitz.

Palomar Community College in San Marcos has seen a steady growth of about 5 percent a year in the number of students enrolling for Spanish classes at the school, said Carlos Gomez, the school's chairman of foreign language studies said last week.

"This summer, we had the highest enrollment ever in Spanish; we are bursting at the seams," Gomez said last week. "The feedback from students is 'I am taking this because in this area you need Spanish and if I want to have an edge and get a job, I need Spanish.' "

The city of San Marcos recently began offering a $35-a-month bilingual salary incentive to its employees, in addition to reimbursing those employees who study Spanish at local colleges. The city also periodically sends groups of employees for cultural-awareness training at the Regional Training Center in Carlsbad.

"One of the things we want to make our employees aware of are the differences in the way people approach different (topics), to make sure we meet their needs, said Lois Navolt, human resources director for the city of San Marcos.

The city of Escondido has also recruited bilingual employees, particularly for front counter jobs, City Manager Clay Phillips said last week. And like San Marcos, the city also offers additional pay for bilingual employees and periodically offers Spanish conversation classes to its employees, he said.

"We are certainly aware of the trend," Phillips said. "Operationally, we continue to make changes to try and accommodate people who are Spanish speaking only."

In the private sector, there is a simple explanation for the increasing need for employees who speak Spanish, said David Sanchez, founder and chief executive officer of the Latino Business Owners Association,

"The market is what is driving the demand for bilingual services," he said.

California is the third largest Latino market in the nation, Sanchez said. The purchasing power of those California Latino consumers stands at $11.1 billion a year, he added.

"In some pockets of North County, one of every two consumers is Latino; in others, one of every three," Sanchez said. "As demographics change, then companies have to adjust to meet that demand and remain competitive."

The benefits of speaking Spanish are not lost on Cal State San Marcos sophomore Shirlyn Jackson, who will begin her second semester of studying the language in the fall, she said

"In jobs now, if you speak Spanish they pay you a little more," Jackson said Friday. "There's less of a language barrier, so it can open up job opportunities."

Contact staff writer William Finn Bennett at (760) 740-5426 or wbennett@nctimes.com.

Horseapples. Make them assimilate.

DEPORT, DEPORT, DEPORT.

All this billingial b/s is costing business and goverments a lot of money!
And for what... so a wetback doesn't have to learn english?
I was born here, but now I'm surpose to be a second class citizen because I no haba espano?
Why was english not been made the offical langish of the US yet !?
I'm sick and tired of having to push one for english whenever I call customer service for anything.
I'm feed up with being told I wasn't hired because I don't speak spanish...
I bet if a employer refused to hire anyone that doesn't speak english there would be goverment lawers lining up to shut him down.