The Law at Work: Don’t adopt English-only workplace policy without clear business need
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is suing Albertsons in San Diego federal court over what the agency calls the grocer’s “unwritten English-only policy, which Albertsons implemented as essentially a no Spanish policy” at its Lake Murray Boulevard store. The EEOC charges Albertsons with violating the federal employment discrimination law, Title VII, which bars national origin discrimination. In his The Law at Work column in the San Diego Union Tribune, Shareholder Dan Eaton examines past rulings regarding English-only policies in the workplace to explain that employers should not adopt such policies without a solid business justification, such as directing it to those found to have used their fluency in a foreign language to abuse co-workers who do not speak it.
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