Latino workers in California and Texas allegedly punished for speaking Spanish in their workplaces will be granted up to $450,000, free English classes and other relief under a consent decree approved this week in a class-action lawsuit filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Los Angeles.
The lawsuit alleged that Skilled Healthcare Group Inc. and affiliated firms, based in Orange County with facilities in six Western and Southern states, enforced an English-only rule against Latinos but not other ethnic groups speaking Tagalog and other languages.
Latino workers were prohibited from speaking Spanish to Spanish-speaking nursing home residents, disciplined for speaking their native tongue in the parking lot on breaks and subjected to other forms of discrimination and harassment, said Anna Park, the EEOC's regional attorney in Los Angeles.
"In the most diverse state in the nation, employers should not single out certain languages and cultures for harsher treatment," Park said.
The healthcare firm's attorney, however, vigorously disputed the allegations and said the two sides settled the lawsuit without testing the claims as a way to avoid costly and time-consuming litigation.
Attorney Thomas Mackey said the first complaint was filed in 2002, when the skilled nursing facilities were under different management. But he asserted that even then the firm never employed an "English-only policy."
He said managers always encouraged employees to speak in the language most comfortable for residents, including Spanish.
Two of the claimants, however, asserted otherwise. Shilo Schilling, a 40-year-old certified nursing assistant, said she was emphatically told at orientations at two of the group's Torrance facilities that only English would be allowed.
"I was kind of in a daze," said Schilling, the bilingual daughter of a Mexican mother and Hawaiian father. "I thought, 'OK, then how are we supposed to communicate with our Spanish-speaking patients?' "
In one case at the Royalwood Care Center in Torrance, she said, a resident told her in Spanish that she needed to use the restroom. When Schilling responded in Spanish, she said, she was told by a supervisor that she would be written up or fired if she continued to speak that language.
Yet some of the supervisors and charge nurses would speak a different language, such as Tagalog, she said. She left the firm after less than a year.
