Who Gets Protection?

For John, BLUF:  Yes, the bureaucrats in the Federal government could be creating resistance to immigration, by slowing assimilation.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Regulators sue Albertsons for allegedly banning employees from speaking Spanish in front of non-Spanish speakers

From The San Diego Union Tribune, by Ms Morgan Cook, Contact Reporter, 3 May 2018.

Here are the first four paragraphs:

Albertsons grocery stores violated the rights of Hispanic employees in San Diego with a policy forbidding workers to speak Spanish around non-Spanish speakers — even when conversing with each other during breaks or helping Spanish-speaking customers, according to a new lawsuit.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued Albertsons Companies, Inc., on Thursday in federal court.  The lawsuit accuses the Idaho-based chain of discriminating against Hispanic employees at San Diego-area stores, harassing them and subjecting them to a hostile workplace because of their race or country of origin.

“Employers have to be aware of the consequences of certain language policies,” Anna Park, an attorney for the commission’s district office covering San Diego County, said in a statement on Thursday.  “Targeting a particular language for censorship is often synonymous with targeting a particular national origin, which is both illegal and highly destructive to workplace morale and productivity.”

According to the lawsuit, the national grocery retailer is one of the country’s largest, employing some 280,000 employees across 35 states.  The company’s stores serve about 2,300 communities and operate under 19 well-known banners, including Albertsons, Vons and Safeway.

Yes, Albertsons and Vons are real supermarkets.

From Law Professor Gail Heriot, teaching in San Diego:

I can’t help but wonder if Americans would have a more favorable attitude toward immigration if the federal government hadn’t been zealously pursuing anti-assimilationist policies for so many decades.  Attempts to impose bilingual education and affirmative action are two of the biggest ones.  (Why identify with the majority if your one of your grandparents will get you diversity points?) But in a small way these “Speak English, please” rules are another example.  (By the way, the EEOC seems to be going out of its way to “interpret” the Albertsons rule to be more demanding than it really is.  It is not the intent of the rule to prevent Spanish-speaking employees from assisting Spanish-speaking customers in Spanish if they happen to be within earshot of an English-speaking customer.)

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff