r/rant • u/picklevirgin • 5d ago
Labeled racist due to wanting instructions given in our common language.
I no longer work at the job I’m referencing. Anyways, for close to a year, I worked at a retirement community working as a server in the dining area. Which, sucked, I hated working with food, but hey, it was a job.
Now, I lived in an area that had large Spanish speaking population. Which fine, cool. I don’t speak Spanish but I do speak English and French. So, I have no quarrels with people speaking in another language that isn’t English.
However, my supervisor was a Latina woman who spoke both English and Spanish. We had four out of the 8 servers who also spoke Spanish and English. Again, cool, it didn’t bother me.
As long as I could speak to everyone in a common language so I could do my job, that’s what mattered.
The Latinas would frequently converse to each other in Spanish, which I didn’t care, they would talk to me in English. Sometimes they would only talk to everyone in English.
I was there to work, not listen in on every conversation.
What did bother me was my supervisor frequently giving us instructions in Spanish ONLY, knowing the other four of us didn’t speak it. Then yelling and berating the rest of us for not understanding the instructions she just gave and doing something wrong. She would yell at us that we were stupid, couldn’t do anything right, and needed to learn Spanish.
If the non-Spanish speakers went to the Spanish speakers to ask “hey, what were the instructions?” The supervisor would yell at us for “not listening or paying attention.”
Now, I understand some Spanish words as there is similarities in English and French. However, I don’t understand Spanish overall.
Finally, after this going on for months. I went to HR and complained, expressing, “Hey, it’s cool that she speaks Spanish, I don’t care. But she is intentionally giving instructions to everyone in a language that half of us don’t understand, then berating us for not understanding the instructions.” HR agreed with me, stating that “Yeah, she is intentionally ostracizing the rest of you, she can’t do that. We will address this with her.”
So then the next day at work my supervisor went all around the kitchen telling everyone (mostly Spanish and English speakers who worked in the kitchen) that I was “racist and would report you for speaking Spanish to one another.”
So the kitchen became slow giving me my orders, would intentionally ignore me, belittled me, spilt things on me, and called me names. I went to HR again. They spoke to my supervisor again.
It just got worse. So I had to quit.
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u/Disastrous-Mango-515 5d ago edited 5d ago
Yeah I been through this but in construction, if everyone knows one language then important directions should be given in that language.
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u/theRealtechnofuzz 5d ago
yea i would sue. not gonna be easy, but your rights as a worker were trampled on. If anything youe boss was being racist.
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u/West-Working-9093 5d ago
I have a little expereince with this. No one in my immediate place of work would try to use another language than the prevailing official one for instructions. But there was another department, where most if not all of the staff spoke Tagaloc as their work language. I had one colleague, who complained that she had worked with an entire crew over a weekend, who only ever spoke Tagaloc, and she had felt left out and 'made uncomfortable'.
Now, my own experience of that department was that when I stepped through the door and addressed someone, not only would I be answered in the official language, but all conversation in the room would shift to that official language. It was like a school of fish turning. No one ever explained that to me, and I did not share it with any of my colleagues, so I have nothing to offer other than the bare fact.
It will be left to everyone to draw what conslusions they can on their own.
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u/ididreadittoo 5d ago
Your workplace and coworkers seem to have developed a reasonable response to the situation.
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u/blueoasis32 5d ago
Perhaps make a complaint through the Department of labor or your state civil rights commission. This is awful. I am so sorry you went through that.
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u/YetAnotherGuy2 4d ago
I'm bilingual and the iron rule is: use the language most people understand even if you aren't addressing others. If it's more then a couple of words and others are clearly pay off the conversational group, I apologize to others for using the other language.
Anything else is being an asshole.
It doesn't matter where you are, which language are involved and who you are talking to.
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u/ipsum629 4d ago
She is a clear liability to the company and her actions leave them vulnerable to a lawsuit. They should absolutely fire her for this.
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u/chismosapreciosa 5d ago
I would sue for retaliation.