"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.
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