hen Veronica Gomez arrived at work in a Dallas suburb one day four years ago, she was met with an ultimatum: Either sign a form agreeing to speak only English in the workplace or lose her job. She signed under protest.
Despite having signed, Gomez, a long-distance telephone operator who was hired for her ability to speak both English and Spanish to customers, was eventually fired by Premier Operator Services, along with other bilingual employees who had protested the policy.
"I was just 17, and I couldn't believe that I had lost a job because they didn't want me to speak Spanish," Gomez says. "We knew this was against our rights."
Among the employees was a high school student who contacted the League of United Latin America Citizens and eventually took the case to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
On Sept. 19, in a default judgment, a magistrate in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas ruled that Dallas-based Premier Operator had indeed discriminated against 13 Hispanic employees, based on a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The court awarded the plaintiffs more than $700,000, the largest monetary award ever won by the EEOC for such a violation.
"Defendant's enactment and implementation of the speak-English-only rule or policy constitutes disparate treatment of Hispanic employees based upon their national origin, in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act," Magistrate Paul Stickney wrote. He said that the rule served no justifiable business purpose and that the intent to discriminate against the Hispanic workers was clear.
While this Texas case stands out, complaints against companies implementing English-only policies have almost quintupled in the last four years. So far this year, the EEOC has received 365 complaints based on English-only policies, compared with 77 in 1996, when it began tracking the charges. The EEOC has prosecuted about 20 lawsuits each year and has been increasingly successful in reaching out-of-court settlements, according to David Grinberg, an EEOC spokesman.
"It's those blanket policies -- where it's not just restricted to regular work, but to phone calls, rest rooms, breaks and outside the building -- where there is no business justification for it," says Grinberg.
EEOC officials point to several reasons for the increase.
One is the EEOC's outreach programs to employees and employers.
In 1996, in accordance with a "national enforcement plan," which says the EEOC will identify and litigate the laws under its jurisdiction, including Title VII of the Civil Rights Law of 1964, the agency identified certain ethnic groups as needing more attention.
Last year, EEOC chairwoman Ida Castro created a task force on national origin that has overseen the outreach to Latino and Asian groups.
"Last year, we touched 25,000 people through our outreach," says Castro. "This year, we've already seen 18,500 individuals."
Castro says such programs are necessary not only to inform, but also to combat a trend of employers increasingly implementing English-only rules that are harsh and punitive in nature.
"Employers do so for a variety of reasons," she explains. "Some have genuine health and safety concerns, but many others have adopted them in order to appease one group of workers over another. That does not foster productivity or creativity, or any normal outcome that an employer would want."
Castro says that through its outreach efforts, the commission has recognized that this language discrimination is not limited to low-wage, blue-collar workers, but also happens to white-collar, high-tech workers, who feel particularly vulnerable to retaliation. She says, however, that blue-collar workers suffer the most retaliation.
$192,000 SETTLEMENT
Another recent victory for the EEOC illustrates the types of situations that blue-collar workers face. On Sept. 1, the EEOC won a $192,000 settlement for eight Hispanic employees in a lawsuit against Illinois-based Watlow Batavia, after the company's implementation of an English-only policy on its assembly line.
Jose Behar, an EEOC supervisory attorney who brought the suit, says that the company had no business justification for implementing the English-only policy because there were no communication problems among employees on the assembly line. Moreover, he said, there was evidence to show that the company had discriminated against Hispanics in other ways.
Edward Jepson Jr. of Chicago's Vedder, Price, Kaufman & Kammholz, who represented Watlow Batavia in the case, notes there was no admission of wrongdoing on his client's part.
He says that "the rule was part of [a] larger performance initiative for three months that only applied to a small number of employees" and that the company had received complaints from two employees who were not bilingual.
Hispanics are not the only minorities feeling the discrimination of English-only policies.
Edward Chen, co-chairman of the Language Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union in San Francisco, which deals with language-based discrimination and access to appropriate government services, says that in California, Asian-Americans have also had concerns about English-only discrimination and have had difficulty finding a legal remedy.
According to Chen, the situation in California is also different from that in other states because of Proposition 63, which amended the state constitution in 1986 to make English the official language in the state.
Chen explains that because of Prop. 63, some employers in California feel emboldened to discriminate by requiring English-only policies. He adds that the courts have not yet ruled on the legality of the proposition.
"Instead of trying to do cross-cultural training and diversity, it validates suspicion and you decrease morale," he says of English-only rules. "It's bad policy whether or not it violates federal law."
Toby Costas, an EEOC attorney in Dallas who worked on the Premier Operator case, says she believes that in states such as California and Texas, there's an increase in language-discrimination cases because of the increasing immigrant population.
Castro, referring to EEOC guidelines against discrimination, advises any employers who are considering implementing an English-only policy to carefully scrutinize the laws, to determine if they have a legitimate business justification for instituting such a policy and what the effects may be on an increasingly diverse work force.
Details about Title VII and EEOC guidelines for employees and employers can be found at http://www.eeoc.gov/.
