Suing English-only employers

By: RICHARD KIRK - For the North County Times



It seems that traditional service organizations now have perpetual bull's-eyes pasted on them. If it's not the Boy Scouts being evicted from Balboa Park for defying the creed of political correctness, it's the Salvation Army facing an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lawsuit for requiring employees to speak English on the job.

The suit against the bell-ringing charity was filed in March of this year and concerns a thrift store in Framingham, Mass., that fired two employees for violating an English-only policy. The EEOC sued the organization even though the employees had been given a year's notice and despite a ruling four years earlier by a federal judge in Boston that upheld the group's English-only policy -- a rule the court found promoted "workplace harmony."

(North County business owners might like to know that the EEOC filed more than 200 anti-English-only suits last year and that exemptions are granted based on the agency's standard for "compelling business necessity." Apparently, the ability to understand what employees are saying about their employer or other employees isn't "compelling" in the eyes of EEOC mandarins.)

In order to save businesses from this innovative bureaucratic interpretation of "civil rights" law, Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., introduced legislation that protects employers with English-only policies from EEOC lawsuits. The provision passed both the Senate (75-19) and the House (218-186) but was killed when the House Hispanic Caucus threatened to derail critical tax legislation if Speaker Pelosi allowed the Alexander amendment (which was attached to a huge appropriations bill) to survive in committee.

So as things now stand, thanks to Hispanic Caucus Chair Joe Baca, D-Calif., the EEOC can bring employers to court for their English-only policies, and those businesses will either have to kowtow to bureaucrat lawyers or face litigation costs.

Meanwhile, as a recent Rasmussen poll indicates, Americans overwhelmingly support (77 percent to 14 percent) an employer's right to set English-only standards in the workplace. (Seventy-seven, by the way, is also the percentage of Americans that oppose giving drivers' licenses to illegal immigrants -- an electoral consensus that recently turned the political heads of Sen. Hillary Clinton and New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and that, in 2003, helped depose Gov. Gray Davis.)

Another Rasmussen poll found 87 percent of Americans agreeing that it is "very important" to speak English in the United States. Indeed, that sentiment is so widespread among Latinos that TV Azteca, Mexico's second largest network, has scheduled a 60-hour series of English classes for its U.S. affiliates. Apparently the network doesn't see English proficiency as a racist stalking horse but rather, as anchor Jose Samano asserts, a tool by which immigrants can increase their incomes by 50 percent or more.

Nevertheless, the EEOC, some Hispanic groups, and a persistent bilingual education lobby in California seem determined to undermine those cultural forces that have helped to integrate newcomers into American society. After all, for interest groups that profit from keeping Latinos in manageable barrios, Gov. Schwarzenegger's advice to immigrants to immerse themselves in English amounts to political poison.

-- Richard Kirk is a freelance writer who lives in Oceanside. Contact him at kirkrg@netzero.com.


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