I’ve only ever worked a single job that tried to enforce that shit, and those motherfuckers were the most racist pieces of shit I’ve had to deal with in person. They thought because I was the only white guy that I was on their side. I still wonder what they did when after the 3rd day of the season, everyone just quit and walked off an hour before lunch.

I once worked somewhere that required English for written things, because you never know who might need to read them later. But spoken conversations or even meetings in another language was okay.

Depending on context it might be stupid or make sense.

At my company, which has 100% Spanish employees, we can talk among ourselves in Spanish. However, in things “for the record” such as jira tickets, git commit messages, documentation pages, they have to be in English.

It makes no god damn sense. Nobody is going to read Jira ticket #6738 in 40 years when we are a multinational. It’s a ticket about fixing a typo in page 567 of the documentation. 100% of employees speak spanish, and some have dogshit English.

Big corp and their pawns wanna listen in on every conversation to stop people from talking shit about the big corp.

Could also be xenophobia (I mean, unless its a company meeting, or some safety requirements where everyone need to know what’s happening (like inside the cockpit of a plane that has an English-only crew member, for example) otherwise its unreasonable to enforce language policies when two peoplr are just chatting.

I find it stupid, because some of them would use Spanish to better explain to the new nurses how to do certain procedures

Ahhh, so its on the job? Could be slightly problematic. I don’t know how your hospital/clinic works, but is it possible someone could miss important info form the converasations?

I think some plane crashes were attributed to communication issues between ATC and the crew, sometimes its miscommunication between crew members. Also can apply in factories, warehouses, where you can get hit by a pallet of stuff if there is miscommunication, for example.

TLDR: If its on the job, it can be reasonable depending on circumstances. If its during break/lunch, fuck no lol, speak whatever you want.

Racism is expensive. Can’t wait til your former company tanks.

I’m pretty sure this would be straight up illegal in my country.

With the NLRB it would have been illegal in the states. A form of preventing workers from organizing.

I don’t think this policy is enforceable in my state. Not that we have much of a mixed language anyway.

I don’t think its appropriate to have as a rule in general. I can understand having a universal language for work related topics if there is someone who doesn’t speak the language present (or isn’t fluent), but a straight out ban on all other languages but the target language? that’s just unneeded and creates a hostile work environment.

Forcing groups or individual workers to communicate in a non-primary language can present employee safety concerns.

There is also a hit to overall productivity, as communications include hesitations or slight pauses and is not nearly as detailed as it could be.

Employees should communicate with each other in the most effective way possible.

my work has an english only rule when talking about work. we hire from all over the world, so making sure there is a common language is nice when i have to message someone in another country.

non-work-related talk is whatever, though.

I work at a place where half of the people speak dutch, the other half come from all over the world.

It helps when everyone speaks the same language, English in this case, and can jump in and out of conversation whenever.

It’s illegal for them to actually ban the use of Dutch, as this is in Belgium. But it’s also just a dick move to exclude people from conversation, just because it’s convenient to some.

It is ridiculous of course but I do have one strange anecdote about this. I have been in a lot of retirement and assisted living homes and there can be some serious tension between racist resident and their non-white caregivers when they speak there languages around them.

One old Vietnam vet would get the fuck triggered out of him when the Filipinos would talk in Tagalog around him. They ended up making a rule that they can’t speak non-english around him. Not saying that this was right, but it was understandable.

For a while I was the only non-spanish speaker on a shipyard barge loading / cleaning crew. The other guys spoke varying degrees of English and I was learning Spanish. Despite the job being incredibly dangerous with huge overhead weight, cranes, massive ships on floating docks, and other heavy equipment abound, we had no real accidents and communicated well. If I didn’t need to know a thing, it was probably said in Spanish. Buy, we kept all radio comms in English, for my sake and for safety.

We decided that, as the workers. Not because some Karen didn’t like Spanish. As long as the work is done safely and communication is timely and in a language understandable by the intended recipients there is not issue. Karen can fuck off.

As a joke you should all go in on a copy Rosetta Stone for her.

A sign of fear. And weakness.

I kind of get it if she’s around and cannot tell if your chat is work-related or not. You could be telling your colleagues to go cut the red wire but she knows it ought to be the blue wire. She could’ve jumped in at that point to correct you, had she understood. But the bomb went off already and everybody died. I’m exaggerating the stakes here obvs.

I would try to keep shit in English when she’s within earshot. And if she sneaked up on you while you’re practicing your Spanish, apologize, acknowledge her wishes, and tell her you were just talking about the weather or the game or whatever. She might just be nervous about you talking about her behind her back - while she’s in the room. So put her mind at ease. Don’t piss off the higher-ups unless you’re willing to lose the job.