Feds sue private business for firing employees who can't speak English

It used to be that, if you came to the United States, you knew you'd have to learn to speak English. After all, if you wanted to assimilate into the culture, get a job, and have a life in your new nation, you'd better know how to speak the language. Unfortunately, assimilation is a thing of the past. Now, the federal government has decided that employers with English-speaking requirements are "discriminating" against a host of minorities.

…Because demanding that your employees be able to understand you and communicate with you is just ridiculous. In this case, the feds have dropped the legal hammer on Wisconsin Plastics, Inc. of Green Bay, Wisconsin. The business is accused of violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlaws any discrimination based on “national origin.” They're trying to argue that an inability to speak English constitutes a “linguistic characteristic of a national origin group” and thus deserves protection. From Judicial Watch:

Here’s the twisted explanation from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency that enforces the nation’s workplace discrimination laws; the Civil Rights Act protects employees from discrimination based on national origin, which includes the linguistic characteristics of a national origin group. Therefore, according to this reasoning, foreigners have the right to speak their native language even during work hours at an American company that requires English.

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Requirements of English fluency and so-called English only rules are often implemented to make what is really discrimination appear acceptable, says the government attorney handling this case. “But superficial appearances are not fooling anyone,” he assures. “When speaking English fluently is not, in fact, required for the safe and effective performance of a job, nor for the successful operation of the employer’s business, requiring employees to be fluent in English usually constitutes employment discrimination on the basis of national origin — and thus violates federal law.” This is just the latest in a long string of Obama administration assaults on small businesses whose owners would like to be able to converse with the people they're paying. Judicial Watch's blog editor, Irene Garcia, told CNSNews that Obama's EEOC is running roughshod over a company’s ability to control who it hires.

She cited numerous cases in which the EEOC has accused businesses of discriminating by requiring workers to speak English, running background and criminal checks, and enforcing company-wide restrictions on head coverings, including those worn by some Muslim women. “We’ve seen some decisions that are kind of radical that we haven’t seen in the past, under Republican or Democrat administrations,” she said, claiming the EEOC under the Obama administration is “on a roll.”

Lest you think the alleged "victims" in this case were just having trouble with their accents or a bit of arcane vocabulary, Garcia says they “were not able to speak English at any kind of level that would be considered proficient.”

“In this case some English is necessary to communicate with supervisors and stuff like that, and the EEOC just went after this private company because some employees were being marked down for not having English skills. So that doesn’t really make sense,” she said.

God forbid that employees are able to speak English fluently, or that the people signing their checks run a criminal background check. If you work at a business that requires you to be a non-criminal English speaker, you're apparently being discriminated against. Welcome to the fundamentally transformed America, enjoy your new status as a victim!. Hopefully this will be the foundation of Obama's next Supreme Court smackdown.