Americans believe that a business should be allowed to require employees to speak English on the job. Or, so says survey results which seem to echo common sense.
Let’s say you’re in a warehouse and a stack of something big and heavy is about to fall on your head. Do you want to be warned in English, Spanish, or Canadian? What language do you speak?
In Connecticut, a company has been sued by five Spanish-speaking workers. The company ordered the employees to speak only English while on the job. Why? Safety concerns. That makes sense, right?
The workers and their lawyers argue that the rule is discriminatory and makes a workplace more hazardous.
Uh, how so?
The most important point is that workers be allowed to communicate effectively, regardless of language, and employers who demand that workers speak English set up a common ground for effective communication between all employees.
Back to those stacks about to fall on your head. A nearby employee yells at you to get out of the way as the stacks begin to fall. In Spanish. Quick, how do you say “look out” in Spanish? See the problem? If a business cannot require a common language to be spoken by employees, only the people below the falling stack who speak (and presumably understand) Spanish would recognize the warning and get out of the way. Everyone else be damned. And squashed.
There is a reason why pilots of commercial airliners are required to speak and understand English. Safety. It’s not that pilots and air traffic controllers cannot speak another language, it’s just that effective communication between people requires something common, such as the language they use.
Guess what? Some Chinese pilots don’t speak or understand English. That could could make understanding and acknowledging instructions from air traffic controllers more difficult, right?
Apparently not. The French, for whom we named our favorite fried potatoes, could handle English-only for 15 days before succumbing to pride and throwing safety out the window.
A requirement for effective and beneficial standards should rise above national linguistic pride. After all, if you cannot communicate to me, and I cannot communicate to you, then one or both of us will be required, assuming we actually want to communicate effectively with one another, to reach some common ground.
I tried to explain to my mother and grandmother, one from the hill country of Missouri, the other from the dust plains of Oklahoma, that the waiter at Don Ho’s Restaurant in The Aloha Tower Marketplace was actually speaking English to them.
My mom replied, “That’s not any English I ever heard.” She was right. It wasn’t. But I understood the waiter’s English just fine. Go figure.
You are absolutely correct about this issue. Although America has been known as a “melting pot,” the country was founded based on the English language. If the Spanish had founded America as we know it, I’d be more than happy to be speaking Spanish right now. My ancestors came over from Germany and Italy and assimilated – they learned to speak English. If I were to go over to, say, Portugal, I wouldn’t go around expecting Portugal to change everything to be in English in addition to Portuguese. Finally, why is it that you don’t hear a bunch of whining and complaining from all the Orientals, Germans, Italians or others? I believe you only get this from those who have come to expect handouts for everything.