Workforce Language Services

According to the Migration Policy Institute, Tennessee had the third-highest increase in foreign-born population in the first few years of the 21st century, over half hailing from Latin America.

An article in The Daily Times points out the positive aspects of this population growth as well as some of the growing pains.  Most notably is the shift in the level of work Latinos have accessed.  Latinos make up the majority of workers in the construction field, and have transitioned from mainly doing grunt work to holding positions in the skilled trades.

Despite the pull of Tennessee’s temperate climate and readily available jobs, life hasn’t been all roses and puppy dogs for some Latinos:

Mares said, however, that some Blount Countians still don’t welcome Hispanics.
“My children have had a very dark, cold experience here in Blount County,” said Mares, a member of the Anti-Racism Task Force and a founder of the Strength in Diversity Group. “I would estimate that roughly 60 percent of our experience has been bad and 40 percent of it has been good.”

He said the Hispanic community is growing in Blount County because of the readily available jobs for immigrants. The mild climate, beautiful scenery and cost of living are “benefits,” according to Mares, but work is the primary draw.

“We need programs that will educate each other about our cultures — it could mend many fences, maybe even eliminate some of the fences,” he said. “I do see some positive things happening here, particularly in the schools. There are people who are trying to make things better.”

“This country is a melting pot, but what makes it work is the English language,” Vento told the commission. “I’m not stupid. I would never put a sign out to hurt my business.”Vento posted two small signs in October 2005 at his shop in a diverse South Philadelphia neighborhood, telling customers, “This is AMERICA: WHEN ORDERING PLEASE ‘SPEAK ENGLISH.’”

Up for discussion at Commission on Human Relations hearing in Philadelphia was whether Vento’s sign was discriminatory.  The governing panel doesn’t think they will make a decision for another few months.  In the meantime, I would hope that potential customers who were unsure about their English skills would find another establishment from which to buy their steak and cheese.

Read more here.

In the online edition of Human Resource Executives, author Michael Felton-O’Brien offers a comprehensive overview of the benefits and drawbacks of occupational Spanish classes across varied industries.

Some benefits to managers’ learning Spanish:

Companies that lack bilingual managers can also miss out on potentially valuable feedback and ideas from workers, ranging from ways that a certain task could be performed more efficiently to ideas for improving safety, she says.

When employers make the effort to help their managers communicate in Spanish or another language, Baron says, it makes a positive difference with employees. “It will make them feel more comfortable going to the supervisor and asking questions and it will increase rapport, which almost everyone believes leads to a safer workplace.”

But the article also notes that in some situations and industries, employees’ limited knowledge of Spanish can be more helpful than harmful:

But, he says, the life-or-death situations that police officers, firefighters and health-care workers encounter on a daily basis may prove more troublesome.

“[Occupational Spanish classes] can actually be worse than nothing in those situations, because people think they know something when they actually don’t,” says Uyehara. “There have been stories in health care and law-enforcement settings where basic misunderstandings occur and people are given the wrong medical treatment with horrendous results. All kinds of bad things can happen if the information isn’t translated correctly.

Looking at both the benefits and potential drawbacks involved suggests that a two-pronged approach would be wise: increasing managers’ capacity for communicating in the language of their personnel while ensuring that qualified interpreters are available for certain situations and in certain industries. 

To read the complete article, click here.

Florida State University is about to begin its third semester of an online course devoted to marketing to Hispanics.  This sounds like an exciting and useful way for professionals from varied industries to learn about marketing strategies specific to the Hispanic population (and possibly earn some Continuing Education credits!). 

Students in the course have testified that participation in it enriches their experience via online discussions with other professionals, case studies, readings, and guest lectures. Joining the group is more than studying the discipline because it encourages thinking and sharing of practices and ideas. The course creates synergy for communication and links professionals that otherwise could not meet each other to discuss their common Hispanic marketing problems and solutions.

The Spring 2008 session has duration of fifteen weeks (classes begin January 7 and end April 25) and includes topics such as language use, Hispanic cultural insights for marketing, and case studies relating to Hispanic marketing. The course will also address research and marketing strategies.

For contact information, click here.

South Carolina’s State Senator Glenn McConnell has proposed a plan which would require all state agencies and local governments to offer all services and materials in an English-only format. 

A Beaufort Gazette editorial states:

This proposal would make South Carolina a part of a growing English-only movement that thinks it is a repair kit for the state if not U.S. immigrant problems. They see them as a threat to language, culture and financial resources.

The message is that if immigrants want to be part of U.S. society, they will learn the language, the driver’s manual and street and highway signs, the laws and the minutiae of regulations that seek order in this country. Never mind that the native population can’t navigate many of these regulations already.

Proposals such as this fail to take into account that assimilation and English acquisition does take place, but it’s a process that takes time.  In the meantime, having documents translated into one’s native language facilitates understanding and a smooth transmission of information.  Even those immigrants who speak English may need documents with specific and advanced vocabulary provided to them in their native language. 

Providing document translation and interpreters to assist in accessing services doesn’t preclude learning English, but facilitates the process of engaging in community life for immigrants as they work toward proficiency in English.

To read more commentary, click here.

Do we train our non-English speaking staff to learn English? Do we train our English-speaking managers to learn Spanish? Do we translate our employee handbooks and other materials into Spanish? These are common questions, not just in clubs but also across industries, as employers struggle with a multilingual workforce – and with largely English-only management.

As Jill Kushner Bishop (president and founder of Workforce Language Services, the company behind this blog you’re reading) explains, these questions deserve thought not only for directors of private clubs, for whom this article was written, but also for managers in any type of industry seeking to integrate non-English speakers into their company’s culture.  She briefly highlights the benefits of an affirmative answer to all above questions, and increased employee morale, retention, and productivity can be strong motivators when considering how to implement her suggested solutions. 

Please click here to read further.

The dearth of lower-paying, unskilled jobs has caused a rift in many low-income communities as immigrants and black Americans compete for these jobs.  Several organizations working in the greater Chicago area are doing outreach to work against the growing division between these communities.  Both the Instituto del Progreso Latino and the Chicago Manufacturing Renaissance Council are looking to train members of both communities in higher paid manufacturing jobs. 

According to Dan Swinney, executive director of the council, deindustrialization has taken thousands of entry-level jobs from Chicago minority communities. But there is a labor shortage for skilled manufacturing jobs that pay more than $60,000 a year due to a generation of specially trained workers on the verge of retirement. “Latinos and blacks are fighting for unskilled jobs when they are more than enough skilled positions to go around,” he said.

The article also highlights the difficulties of uniting these two communities, despite the fact that they share many of the same issues and struggles:

Finding such common threads among these disparate groups of workers is one of the toughest challenges facing advocates and workers alike, said Tim Bell, executive director of Chicago Workers Collaborative, a group that works mostly with Latino day labor workers. “There is a real issue in terms of jobs, and it takes a lot of education and conscience building to overcome these animosities,” he said. “But the potential for collaboration is certainly there.”

A recently released study by the Pew Hispanic Center traces language use and acquisition by immigrants and the generations that follow.  Amidst debate surrounding the English-only movement, the study shows that only first generation immigrants mostly speak and seek out services in their native languages.  The study finds that Mexicans are least likely to be conversational in English, a fact partially attributed to lower levels of education.

This and other studies also trace the loss of language across generations:

According to the Pew study, immigrants are more likely to speak English very well if they are college-educated, arrived in the U.S. as children or spent many years here.

Similar studies have also concluded that immigrants’ native languages recede over generations. Rumbaut co-wrote a study released last year that said Mexicans and Central Americans retain their language longer than Asians and white Europeans but that even among Mexicans, 96% of the third generation prefer to speak English at home.

“Like taxes and biological death, linguistic death seems to be a sure thing in the United States, even among Mexicans living in Los Angeles,” Rumbaut’s study said.

To read more commentary on the study and its implications, click here.

In this article, Judith Lindenberger, MBA and Marian Stoltz-Loike, Ph.D. provide a fascinating summary of the challenges that companies face in an increasingly diverse workforce as well as eight practical guidelines on how to create an effective diversity strategy. 

The following excerpt shows both the difficulties as well as the joys of working in a diverse company, and is followed by insight into how to better respond to the needs of a diverse workforce while meeting the company’s bottom line:

A benefit of a diverse workforce is the ability to tap into the many talents which employees from different backgrounds, perspectives, abilities and disabilities bring to the workplace. An impressive example of this is found on the business cards of employees at one Fortune 100 technology company. Employees at this company have business cards that appear normal at first glance. On closer inspection, the raised Braille characters of employee information are evident.

Many companies, however, still face challenges around building a diverse environment. Part of the reason is the tendency to pigeonhole employees, placing them in a different silo based on their diversity profile. If an employee is male, over 50, English, and an atheist, under what diversity category does this employee fall? Gender, generational, global or religious? In the real world, diversity cannot be easily categorized and those organizations that respond to human complexity by leveraging the talents of a broad workforce will be the most effective in growing their businesses and their customer base.

The Student Worker organization at CU is training students volunteers to work one-on-one with Spanish speaking staff to teach them English.  The program’s benefits are two-fold: it improves cultural sensitivity towards staff that doesn’t speak English, and helps Spanish speaking staff to gain language skills.  Nearly 48 percent of service and maintenance staff are Latino, but the university isn’t clear on how many of them only speak Spanish, as there are many positions in which it’s not necessary to speak English.  Currently this program is all volunteer, both for the tutors and the learners.  But the Student Worker organization is attempting to garner support from various departments so that ESL classes can become part of workers’ paid work schedule.

Despite the mention of a sometimes hostile and disrespectful environment, students have shown their interest and support:

“We’ve had an overwhelming number of students contact us interested in volunteering,” said Patrick Kelsall, 21, a junior sociology major and member of Student Worker. “We didn’t really expect it to be this popular.”

Student Worker uses the nonprofit organization Intercambio as a teaching resource for training students to tutor staff members. Intercambio works to build respectful communities and broaden opportunities for immigrants through language education.

Volunteers are required to go through four to six hours of training with Intercambio. They are given background information about program, and curriculum and tips for teaching English.

A Spanish background is not needed in order to provide English lessons to staff members, a Student Worker members said.

Read more here.