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Nurses win language discrimination case | ||
Tags: Discrimination | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| QiuJP Triglot Senior Member Singapore Joined 5855 days ago 428 posts - 597 votes  Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Czech, GermanB1, Russian, Japanese | Message 1 of 7 18 September 2012 at 4:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Filipino nurses win language discrimination settlement
link This certainly very sad news for a language lover. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kartof Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5066 days ago 391 posts - 550 votes Speaks: English*, Bulgarian*, Spanish Studies: Danish | Message 2 of 7 18 September 2012 at 6:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't understand why this is sad news. My mother is a nurse and when she first began work in the US, she hardly
spoke any English. Yes, she had taken classes before she and my father came here, but she hardly spoke well enough to interact with patients and their families. She could communicate face to face because it was easier to grasp English with the aid of body language, but she was scared to pick up the phone at work at all. And yet she knew her medicine and kept excellent record keeping and never had a problem with her employers in that sense. She was and still is ridiculed for her accent to this day although she is very fluent in English. They mentioned in the article that the nurses were ridiculed for speaking Tagalog on the phone. To this day, I still speak to my mother on the phone in Bulgarian while she's at work, although she's a manager now and is constantly speaking on the phone with other nurses in English. Learning a language takes time and it is hardly on the top of an immigrant's priority list; making a living and surviving is. 11 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5532 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 7 18 September 2012 at 9:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Spraying people's food with air freshener? Yelling at people for speaking Tagalog to
family members on the phone? Asking security guards to follow people around? Publicly humiliating people about their accents? In the US, this kind of behavior will normally result in a severe reprimand from a company's lawyers, possibly followed by disciplinary action or termination. There may be countries where it's normal to treat employees like those nurses. But any US manager who treats their subordinates in an abusive and discriminatory way is creating a serious legal risk for their employer. (If you abuse your employees in a non- discriminatory fashion, that's a different legal issue.) Here's a sample set of recommendations for US companies who want to require that people use English at work:
Here's a sample policy that requires English for most work-related tasks. Basically, US employers have a lot of leeway to demand English (or even Spanish) if they're sensible about it. Edited by emk on 19 September 2012 at 12:02am 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| alang Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 7221 days ago 563 posts - 757 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 4 of 7 19 September 2012 at 8:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
can you elaborate on the bold section? I am confused? What I read, the harassment targeted Filipino nurses only, but I would think if it continued the problems would magnify. In this case it hopefully stopped the harassment from spreading to other people, and prevented a situation that really could have gotten out of hand. At least the topic is in the open. Edited by alang on 19 September 2012 at 9:01pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5130 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 5 of 7 19 September 2012 at 9:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
This isn't the first, nor will it be the last time this comes up. This story, and others like it, have been in the news in California for a long time - since English became the "official" language in the state in the mid 1980s. Some employers are bigger dicks than others. That's always been the case. In any case, I don't think this has anything to do with language learning. Rather, it's a political hot-button issue. R. == 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| QiuJP Triglot Senior Member Singapore Joined 5855 days ago 428 posts - 597 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Czech, GermanB1, Russian, Japanese | Message 6 of 7 20 September 2012 at 4:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
I am sorry that I didn't state it property. It is indeed sad because there are still people who laugh and ridicule a learner's accent and his native language. Personally, I have met people who say this remark: "I do not speak with people whose language is written in primitive pictures. Only yellow skinned apes speak this sh*t language. Now f off!" I do not wish to mention the country I met this person, because he does not represent entirely his country and I love this country, culture and spirit. But this is indeed shocking! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5262 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 7 of 7 20 September 2012 at 5:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Ignorance, racism and intolerance are certainly not monopolized by any one country or people. In the US, things are getting better but incidents still happen to remind us why we have laws and the courts to provide a remedy. A constant vigil must be maintained to assure that we don't go back to the bad old days. To quote Martin Luther King- "We ain't where we want to be. We ain't where we're goin' to be, but thank God we ain't where we used to be."
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