The unofficial path to the new monolingualism

Felicie C. writes:

A couple of weeks ago, my daughter went to the Orange County Fair in Southern California. Next to the ticket booth, she saw a sign that said “The Orange County Fair is an equal opportunity employer; not all of our employees speak English.” Indeed, they didn’t. My daughter was with a friend who is gluten-intolerant. When they wanted to buy snacks, they had a hard time trying to find someone who understood “does it have wheat?” question. A man selling corndogs kept answering this question with “around the corner, around the corner.” If the gluten-intolerant friend bought something by mistake and had an allergy attack, then, I guess, they could have sued the organizers of the Orange County Fair. I wonder if this would have made any difference to their policy. I also wonder at the broad definition of the term “equal opportunity.” Now it appears to mean that job qualifications (ability to communicate with customers) should not be used as discrimination criteria. Just another thing to make the knowledge of Spanish a de facto requirement of living in California. Not bilingualism, mind you. Otherwise the service sector would be required to speak both languages. But if the service sector speaks only Spanish, customers are forced to learn Spanish.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 12, 2009 10:34 PM | Send