Posted on 11/15/2007 4:39:26 PM PST by SmithL
A government suit against the Salvation Army has the House and Senate at loggerheads over whether to nullify a law that prohibits employers from firing people who don't speak English on the job.
The fight illustrates the explosiveness of immigration as an issue in the 2008 elections.
Republicans on Capitol Hill are pushing hard to protect employers who require their workers to speak English, but Democratic leaders have blocked the move despite narrow vote tallies in the GOP's favor.
For more than 30 years, federal rules have generally barred employers from establishing English-only requirements for their workers. But Senate Republicans have won passage of legislation preventing the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from enforcing the rules.
House Democratic leaders, meanwhile, have promised Hispanic lawmakers that the language issue is a nonstarter and the resulting impasse has stalled the underlying budget bill, which lawmakers had hoped to send to President Bush this week.
The EEOC has come under assault from lawmakers such as Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., after the agency filed suit earlier this year against a Salvation Army thrift store in Massachusetts that had fired two Hispanic employees for speaking Spanish while sorting clothes.
Supporters of the EEOC regulation — which can be waived if there is a legitimate business or safety purpose to require English — say it protects workers from discrimination based on their national origin, which is barred under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
"I cannot imagine that the framers of the 1964 Civil Rights Act intended to say that it's discrimination for a shoe shop owner to say to his or her employee, 'I want you to be able to speak America's common language on the job,'" Alexander said Thursday.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Time to light up the phones to get this fixed.
Time to make English the one official language of this country.
Amen.
Some of the scoundrels who framed this POS legislation are still around, including the "main man-atee" himself, Unkkkle Ted. So why don't you 'axe' them? I think you'd be disappointed with their answer, proving the Act was crap to begin with.
Yep!
English-only? No. English definitely? Yes.
Libs want to keep the immigrants dumb and dependent. If they are required to learn the language they will catch on to the libs plans for them. Come to think of it maybe not, most will enjoy all the freebee’s they get from thier liberal democratic masters at the expense of the American middle class who has to pay for everything.
There is another winning issue for the GOP. Hope they jump on it.
Okay, but official for what exactly? for instance; do you feel it is necessary for federal legislation to be passed that would prohibit businesses from offering application forms or any advertisments in a foreign language? Because that’s how you xenophobic kooks are beggining to sound when you post this kind of nonsensical crap.
But, what you are saying here is that the GOP stepping in, publicly professing to legislating an English-only, prohibiting foreign languages in the course of business, is a winning issue? How does more government and prohibition on freedoms equate to winning? If this kind of sh!t is the modern day conservatism, then this country is going to a have a radical party realignment in the very near future.
No. This is about an employer being able to require her employees to speak English, or any other language of her choosing, in the workplace, without fearing the government will sue her for violating equal opportunity laws.
So then you support the EEOC lawsuit against the Salvation Army?
Let's play devil's advocate though: suppose a manager fired an employee for speaking a foreign language to a customer who did not speak English and the employee was helping make a sale? No, bad example...for the border/immigration crowd, this doesn't take out the raw emotions enough. Okay, lets say its the first Wednesday of November 2008 and two employees are discussing politics while no customers are around and they're stocking shelves within a few feet of one another. They are in celebratory moods because the Republicans have taken back the House and won the presidency one again. But their manager, being a hippie holding onto the past and an avowed far Left Democrat, overhears the discussion and terminates the employees on the spot. The former employees get an attorney because current "laws" have been broken. The MSM does not touch the story but people like the ratings-whore Bill O'Reilly take the story and run with it. How would you feel about a lawsuit in this instance knowing that EEO "laws" are on the books?
So, if the “required language” in any given workplace just happened to be Spanish, for example, and some English broke out amongst two employees working in proximity to one another while performing a mundane task, you’d support a similar canning Of the employees. Or is it that you’d reject any lawsuit brought on by the former employees whose only thing they had done wrong was to upset their employer by speaking English on the job.
What does official mean and how encompassing will “official” be? Is this a winning issue. Is this what Jesus had in mind when He asked us to love our neighbor? Can I get an “amen”, please!?
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