Employees Resentful : 2nd Language Translates as More Work

Paula Soriano’s job for a telephone company in California’s Central Valley was driving her nuts.

Because she spoke Spanish, she was always being interrupted by co-workers who had non-English-speaking customers on the line. Some days, translations made up half her workload, she said.

Soriano, a customer service representative, had not been hired because of her bilingual ability and she was not being paid more for it. In fact, she believed that she was being penalized: Her company’s worker-productivity formula gave her no credit for the time she spent helping other reps with their Spanish calls.

Refused to Translate

And so one day in 1987, the embittered, middle-aged widow flatly refused to translate a call.

Soriano’s truculence was left to simmer as an isolated gripe until last month, when the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a lawsuit in federal court in Los Angeles against her employer, Contel Service Corp. The government charged that Contel was violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by requiring Soriano to speak Spanish without compensation.

The suit is the first in the nation to raise the question of whether private businesses should be compelled to pay higher wages to workers who must make extensive use of a second language, the EEOC says.

It contains implications that intrigue workers and frighten some employers. Take a common scenario: A supervisor learns a secretary is bilingual when he overhears her speaking Spanish during a break, and then begins to add translations to her duties. Does that constitute harassment based on national origin?

The circumstances of the Soriano case have touched a raw nerve among tens of thousands of workers who are often hired because they speak two languages and who gradually become their company’s bridge to a swelling pool of non-English-speaking customers and clients.

In offices, factories, hospitals and supermarkets, these employees are routinely required to break away from their assigned tasks to interpret phone calls, deal with counter inquiries and translate or draft letters. The added responsibilities often create far more disruption and pressure than is faced by monolingual employees assigned to the same job.

‘Sheer Exploitation’

The uncompensated use of bilingual workers is “both a nuisance and sheer exploitation of someone’s additional skills,” said Antonio Rodriguez, an attorney affiliated with the Latino Community Justice Center in East Los Angeles. “You’re looking at companies that would lose their trade . . . or would have to hire professional translators . . . if these employees refused to use their bilingual skills.”

Bilingual bonuses as high as several thousand dollars a year for teachers, police, nurses and other workers have become institutionalized in government agencies, particularly in California, which in 1973 passed a law requiring public agencies to increase the number of bilingual employees in “public-contact” positions.

But in the private sector in California, only 5% to 8% of businesses pay additional compensation to public-contact workers, according to an estimate by the Merchants and Manufacturers Assn., a statewide employers group.

To many economists, the business community is simply enjoying an imbalance in the job market, said Richard Belous, a senior economist with the National Planning Assn., a research group sponsored by business and labor. Management benefits from the swelling number of bilingual Latinos and Asians who, in the competitive search for jobs--particularly at the bottom rung--are in no position to ask for more money.

‘Complaints Have Increased’

Among employees, however, resentment abounds.

“We have heard complaints like (Soriano’s) for a long time and the number of complaints have increased in the last couple of years,” said Jose Roberto Juarez Jr., regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

“People are beginning to realize that the things they started doing as a favor to an employer have now become a very burdensome part of their job. . . . A year or two down the road, the employee becomes extremely frustrated because he sees he’s expected to do more for that amount of pay,” Juarez said.

Many employers “have taken the attitude that because there are a lot of Asians and Latinos who are in the area, they might as well hire them and use their language as an added benefit but not pay them for it, and it wouldn’t matter because there are so many unemployed people that they won’t complain,” said Diane Pasillas, executive director of the 600-member Latin Business Assn.

In contrast to Latino rights groups, the Asian Pacific Legal Center, an influential organization in fighting discrimination against Asians, has not received many complaints from bilingual employees, according to Kathy Imahara, a staff attorney who works for the center’s language-rights project. “Asians have a tendency not to complain a lot,” she said.

Beyond the question of compensation is a pervasive fear that an employer’s need for bilingual employees works against some of the career aspirations of such workers, said Richard Martinez, a Tuscon, Ariz., attorney.

“There is a drag effect,” said Martinez, who represents clients in two lawsuits against Arizona police departments that do not pay bilingual bonuses. “Employers who need Spanish-speaking employees tend to limit the number of slots for Hispanics so that they hire enough for their language needs and no more. Also, these Hispanics who are hired tend not to get promoted as often because employers need them in the lower-level jobs that have contact with the public.”

One of Martinez’s clients, Juanita Cota, a Tuscon police service operator, said she was denied a request to trade shifts so that she could care for a dying brother.

“There were people willing to trade with me but the sergeant said no because it would have meant leaving the shift uncovered as far as having a Spanish speaker available,” Cota said.

Such complaints typify how Spanish-speaking employees are “subjected to higher requirements than their (non-Spanish-speaking) peers,” said Richard Reyna, an employment lawyer.

Reynaldo F. Masias, a sociologist and professor of education and language who directs the Center for Multilingual and Multicultural Research at USC, said an employer often hires someone because he is bilingual but fails to be honest with the employee about the value of that skill.

‘Unwritten Expectation’

“Very often it is an unwritten expectation where, unless the employee brings it up, the employee doesn’t know it is a condition of employment,” Masias said.

Supervisors who ask such workers to break away from their assigned tasks to translate are often desperate, under pressure to make a system function smoothly in the face of daunting language problems.

Education--where bilingual bonuses are common, but where the number of bilingual teachers is still far below administrative goals--is a frequently cited example.

The Los Angeles School District has 145,000 Latino students who are not fluent in English, but only about 1,400 fully credentialed Spanish bilingual instructors--a ratio of about 100 to 1. As a result, anyone who can speak Spanish is often recruited to plug leaks.

Stress From Interruptions

“You take a bilingual teaching assistant,” said Carlos Barron, a bilingual consultant in the district’s Professional Development Center. “He’s hired to help a teacher who’s not foreign-speaking. But lots of principals pull these T.A.s out of the classroom to call parents, translate papers that go home. Do the T.A.s (who do not qualify for bilingual bonuses) spend the time with the kids to do what they were hired for? No.”

A nurse at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said she did not apply for the county hospital’s bilingual bonus because of the stress of being interrupted. She explained that she is one of two or three bilingual nurses among a shift of 12 in a hospital where patients are 90% Latino and many speak no English.

“I love my people. I don’t mind interpreting for my own patients, but 10 times an hour (Spanish-speaking) patients stop you, or doctors want you to interpret--they forget you have a load of your own,” the nurse said. “You walk down the hallway and somebody stops you, then two or three others see you speaking Spanish and they want you to help them.

“I finally told my supervisors I’d translate only in an emergency. . . . So they treat me like I’m selfish. That hurts. But I had to say, ‘That’s enough.’ ”

Difficult Translations

In their desire to increase their staff’s bilingual presence, employers sometimes assume that all Spanish-surnamed workers speak the language. In fact, between 20% and 33% of Latinos in the U.S. speak only English, said Dr. John A. Garcia, head of the political science department at the University of Arizona.

Many workers who do speak Spanish find translating difficult, especially in a diverse region such as Southern California, where Spanish is spoken with a wide variety of idioms. Often an interpreter must be facile enough to translate complex ideas into an easily understandable generality.

Latinos express considerable resentment of Anglo bosses who do not take into account these variables.

“This is classic discrimination . . . this whole attitude that ‘Spanish is your native tongue, we’re not asking you to do anything more difficult than people who can swim,’ ” Martinez said.

Pay Not an Issue

When Paula Soriano talks about this dilemma, she stresses that she did not care about whether she was paid more for speaking Spanish. She simply wanted to be left alone. She hated the fact that she was being asked to do more than Anglo co-workers and would go home at night and discuss it with her four children.

“They’d say, ‘We’re not even going to learn that language,’ ” said Soriano, 58, who lives in Sanger, about 15 miles outside Fresno, and still works in a Contel office in Exeter. “They’d say, ‘Look at what it’s done to you.’ ”

Sometimes, Soriano said, she would be the only Spanish-speaking person in her unit and would have to handle all the Spanish calls. Other times she would share them with one or two other employees. Regardless, she said, she hated the pressure and the irritations that went with it, such as the non-English-speaking customer from Mexico who criticized her Spanish.

“Some of these people, they’re educated--I can’t understand their Spanish,” she said in a soft, gravelly voice.

Ordered Home

On the day in 1987 that Soriano refused a Spanish-speaking call, she was ordered by a supervisor to go home for the rest of the day, according to the EEOC and representatives of Soriano’s union, the Communication Workers of America.

Soriano assumed that she would be fired. But the next day, she said, she was asked to sign a document promising to translate calls and was told that she would be fired if she did not. She signed in protest. Then she complained to her union and eventually to the EEOC.

Contel has refused to comment on the EEOC’s lawsuit. It said through an attorney that the allegations grow out of the company’s “sensitivity to serve the Hispanic community.”

Three years ago, under pressure from the state Public Utilities Commission, the state’s three major phone companies--Contel, Pacific Bell and GTE California--agreed to improve service to non-English-speaking customers. The phone companies said they would consider establishing new job classifications with pay differentials for workers with multiple language skills. While GTE and Pacific Bell have established separate customer-assistance phone centers for Latino callers, they do not pay bonuses to workers who staff them.

Lee T. Paterson, an employment lawyer who represents management, said while it might be unfair for an employer to refuse to pay extra for an employee who makes extensive use of a second language, it is not unlawful discrimination.

“It’s like two people who sit next to each other in an office and one works twice as hard but they are both paid the same,” Patterson said. “It’s not fair, but it’s not unlawful discrimination.”

Sitting in a restaurant in Fresno a couple weeks ago, Soriano said she feels relieved now that the government has finally taken up her case. She said she feels less put-upon by her supervisors, although she continues to do translations as assigned.

Still, there was the manager who warned her recently that her defiance would be a curse “you’ll wear like a scar for the rest of your life.”

And there was the sobering moment in a Northern California hospital a couple weeks after the EEOC suit had been filed. She had gone to visit a daughter, who was recuperating from back surgery. The attending nurse suddenly had to excuse herself.

“She said, ‘I’ll be back. I got to go,’ ” Soriano said. “She said, ‘I’m the only Spanish-speaking nurse on this floor. I have to go see what they want.’ ”