Human Resource Blog

Mandate English in the workplace

Can an employer mandate English in the workplace except for when it is reqireed to communicate with customers?
I am afraid that we have staffmembers giving instructaions in Spanish and the directions are wrong . ALL employees are very fluent in English .

English only policies are a minefield, and we would suggest that you find another way to handle this problem. Unlike other countries, the U.S. has no official language, so employees have as much right to speak Greek, Polish or Spanish at work as English. There have been a number of high-profile court cases on this topic in the past decade, sometimes with conflicting rulings. It is always expensive for an emloyer to become a test case for anything.

In some cases, you can require that employees use English only for business communications — meaning discussions of work-related matters. At least one court has ruled that this keeps everyone informed of what is going on, and facilitates training and quality control, which is your goal. However, other courts have ruled that two Hispanic employees still have the right to have a non-work conversation in Spanish. Unless you are very fluent in Spanish, it is going to be hard to tell which is which.

A further wrinkle in your situation is that employees must sometimes use Spanish for business communication with clients. This makes it almost impossible for you to discern when it is necessary and when it is not.

A number of employers have lost discrimination suits when they enforced English-only rules against some employees, and not others. In one prominent case in New York, Hispanic employees were prohibited from speaking Spanish to each other, while Polish janitorial employees were permitted to speak to each other in Polish. It is illegal to discriminate against employees based on national origin, so this was unlawful discrimination.

So we would suggest that you handle this problem in a different way. Since you are concerned that some staff members may be giving others incorrect information, address that issue instead of the language. Designate certain individuals as trainers, or conduct training sessions to correct the problems. And of course the simpliest way to correct this problem is to hire a supervisor or trainer who is fluent in both English and Spanish.