The case in point involved two women at a Salvation Army thrift store, who had been there 5 years, who were caught speaking Spanish to each other while they were sorting clothes. For this act, they were fired, let go from their jobs. The US Government's EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) brought an action against the Salvation Army to reinstate the women. Congressmen took action to block the EEOC. The issue has escalated to a heated battle in Congress that you can read about in "English only workplace rules stir debate", LA Times, Nov 20,2007. Briefly:
WASHINGTON --(AP News) A government lawsuit 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 volatility 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 Latino lawmakers that the language issue was a nonstarter and the resulting impasse has stalled the underlying budget bill, which lawmakers had hoped to send to President Bush this week....
I will attempt to focus more on how we, as a society, attempt to think about and discuss this kind of problem than on which way this particular issue should be resolved. They are different problems, and the disagreement over the issue surfaces the far more general structural problem that
we, in the US, don't know how to resolve such issues, only how to fight over them until one side gets 51% of the votes and can "win."At least, for a few years ... then problems embedded in that solution become more visible, and the "other side" gets 51% of the vote, and "wins" and changes the rules. At least, for a few years ... Etc.
In more mature societies, like Japan, this "let's fight" approach to decision-making went out of fashion a thousand or more years ago. If our children attempt to resolve what TV show to watch by a fist-fight, we intervene and tell them to "grow up." It's good advice.
Right now, according to the LA Times, the question of how to deal with employees and English has succeeded in blocking passage of a budget bill in the US Congress, which was due October 1st -- 6 weeks ago. I suspect there are other issues similarly blocked. It seems obvious to me, and to much of the world outside Washington, that this entire process of reaching decisions has run out of steam, and it will only get worse as problems get more complex and the ones we have neglected start piling up even higher in the back room.
If we're waiting until the world gets simpler again, it will be a very long wait.Now, in my mind, the up-stream issue here isn't English, it's how we can learn as a society to resolve issues instead of whatever you call it that we do now. By "resolve", I mean that happy case where the root issues are actually fixed, and the symptoms don't keep popping up again and causing yet more conflict. We can "check it off" our list. We can be done, once and for all, with it and with the hard feelings and on-going damage the current 51% solutions are causing. We can stop the bleeding, not just put on a new bandage.
One such issue is annoying, but we now have so many issues that our infrastructure is crumbling, government can't function, and the world would be rolling on the floor laughing at us if we didn't also have a huge army, nuclear weapons and, apparently, poor self-regulation.
How do we fix that state of affairs?
Let's go back and look at this problem from at least two viewpoints, seeking what are rational concerns, not irrational conclusions.
From the employer's point of view, it is, I think a legitimate and responsible concern to want to maintain sufficient control over events so that the business can continue to operate and grow. I am guessing here that managers who don't speak a second language feel they can't manage what's going on if they can't understand what people on their staff are saying to them. And managers want employees who have to work together to be able to communicate fairly effortlessly so they can coordinate efforts to get the job done. If a third employee, say, couldn't assist because that employee didn't speak Spanish and the two women refused to speak English in that case, this would be a problem. Those are reasonable concerns.
On the other hand, the EEOC seems justified in intervening when unvarnished ignorance or prejudice or bigotry or paranoia on the part of managers punishes people for actions that are causing no harm to the business. Prohibiting an employee from talking over the phone to her child in Spanish during a work-break or lunch would seem an obvious example of that.
An international business framework, on the other hand, would say that the US needs to wake up to the fact that the rest of the world, and many customers, do not speak English, or would prefer to use some other language if possible. It would seem that a fully bilingual staff and management would not only solve the management issues, but would make a far more powerful business able to work directly with many more customers.
And, on a different level, employees do speak a different language than management, even when they are all speaking in English. That isn't fixed by demanding everyone speak English.
It is reasonable to work towards a common language that people can use when they need to come together, and in most of the USA that was not previously part of Mexico or Spain, that would probably be English. A common language is good.
It seems unreasonable to expect that diverse subcultures should all be abandoned in order to homogenize everyone and abandon the richness and capacity that a multilingual and multi-cultural workforce brings to the job.
Unity is needed above diversity, not instead of diversity.The situation can be framed at a local scale that "the problem" is diversity, and the diversity should be made to go away so business can thrive. If we stand back and look at the larger scale, at the international world today, that's a poor frame. So, the situation could be framed differently - that "the problem" is that we, as a society, are not very literate or mature in how to work with and across diversity, and we need to fix that, so that business can thrive even more on an international stage.
I agree whole-heartedly that internal communication within most business organizations today in the USA is just terrible, and this poses a serious threat to their operation and survival. Also, communication between the business and the outside world is pretty bad, and poses a similar threat.
These communication issues damage the "vertical internal loop" and the "horizontal external loop" of feedback that are the minimum capacity of any cybernetic adaptive system period. (see my earlier posts on the two loops ).Demanding everyone speak English cannot even fix the internal loop, because subcultures use English differently, and forcing English-only damages the external loop in today's world. A common language is a good thing, but the context for it has to be not only diversity-tolerant, but diversity-embracing and encouraging and nurturing, or you've solved the wrong problem.
Both business and individuals have legitimate needs to thrive and grow, but in the Big Picture these cannot possibly ever be met by homogenizing the workforce. A common language is good, but as an "auxiliary language", when we need to cross cultures, not as a one-size-fits-all requirement. People need to coordinate and collaborate, yes -- but the wider solution to that is to improve our ability to collaborate across diversity, not to eliminate diversity.
The multi-level view, accepting the legitimacy of corporate needs as well as individual employees, if carried out correctly, leads inexorably to a focus on solving issues of "unity in diversity." That resolves issues at all levels. Only that resolves issues at all levels. Anything else is ultimately a waste of time, that will have to be redone. In "lean manufacturing" terms, it is "muda" - trying to solve a problem by getting good at something you shouldn't be doing in the first place, and blocking the actual solution in the process.
In medicine, attacking symptoms instead of problems is called "quackery." It's recognized as a bad thing that, first of all, actually does harm. It's a good concept. If we want health at all levels, a healthy society, healthy world-connected business, and healthy individuals, we need to focus our limited resources on the right problem: unity in diversity.
As a side-bar, I wonder how much of this issue would loom so huge in the US if we had the belief that Americans, like the rest of the world, were genetically capable of learning to function well in several different languages. I feel there is an unspoken fear, or anxiety, or maybe a spoken one, that we are somehow incapable of learning other languages, so we have this unspoken constraint on which language that should be. We see this as an "OR" problem, not an "AND" problem.
I wrote Noam Chomsky at MIT, one of the world's best linguists, actually, and asked him whether he thought Americans had some issue that prevented them from learning multiple languages. He replied no, in his mind it was just that we'd managed to get by this far without needing to do that so people felt no pressure to learn other languages.
On a separate tangent, I note that some "conservatives" or whatever the term is these days believe that it is not the appropriate job of "government" to be micromanaging the internals of companies, although that concept doesn't seem to scale down, as they then also believe it's OK for managers to micromanage employees. I agree, somewhat, it it shouldn't be the Federal Government that has to intervene to push companies to wake up to the world and diversity, if the right people would pick up that task and do their job. In my mind, that would be the stockholders and investors who are trying to maximize their wealth and the ability of companies they have invested in to thrive. Enlightened investors, looking at the world, would almost certainly think company management should stop being parochial and short-sighted and get with the new world-scale program.
I'm baffled as to why they don't express that sentiment more loudly and focus instead on short-term gains that are devastating long-term gains. A sin of "youth" I guess, that hasn't yet realized that the end of the road of maximum short-term gains is ruin, not victory.
Maybe it really is that we don't train our children to think about different reference frames. The strategy "Sacrifice the future for today", when we get to the tomorrow we're trying to survive to reach, actually plays out as "You sacrificed today for yesterday, which is gone now." We've been doing a lot of that lately, and now "The future isn't what it used to be."
Today's NY Times also has an article on how widespread the psychological phenomenon is of "denial." Maybe that's relevant to this discussion.
In any case, if you keep throwing out all the past, it's really hard to be a "learning organization." We seem to have, as a nation, a problem in being better able to deal with the day each day. If anything, judging from the state of Congress, or the local governments in Michigan and California we seem increasingly less able to deal with each day. We have what T.S. Eliot described as an "age that moves progressively backwards."
While other people or places or things may be "to blame" for causing some issues we face, it's hard to look any place but the mirror for an inability to learn from experience.
As I said once, if each step takes you further from your goal, you will never reach it.
We have some piece of our social structure in backwards, it would appear.
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