"We are in America, %@$@ it, they should speak English!!!"
This is what a farm manager told me sometime ago as he complained about his newly hired Latino employees speaking Spanish at work and him and other employees not being able to understand what they were saying…
"If they want to speak Spanish, he continued, they can do that at home, not here. When they are at work, they should speak English, English, English!!!"
He told me this in a very demanding tone. I guess he thought that if he were demanding enough the situation would change.
Easier said than done, I thought…
This manager worked for a company that had turned to the available Latino workforce as an option to fill the jobs it couldn’t fill with native U.S. workers. This, of course, brought with it a new set of challenges.
Is Latino Labor in the Agricultural Industry a Thing of the Past? This past June I had the opportunity to address pork producers at the World Pork Expo (audio and slides). At that time, the key message of my presentation had to do with the idea that producers no longer had to worry about finding workers to get the job done at their farms.
Perhaps a sign of relief; at least something producers did not have to worry about during these turbulent times… It made sense… When you considered the high unemployment rates prevalent for several months and the number of displaced workers willing to do just about any type of job, most producers had a lot more job applications to choose from and fewer jobs to fill as employees “stayed put” waiting for the recession storm to go by.
Mark Chambers from SunTerra outlines how his company expanded its Hispanic workforce and what they’re doing to help ease the transition to a different area and culture.
on player below.
SwineCast 0203
