Orange County. 1990 The Year in Review : Firms Change Ways With Ethnic Shifts in the Work Force
At Gish Biomedical Inc. in Santa Ana, all employees have the day off for Tet, the Chinese New Year.
Over at Carl Karcher Enterprises Inc. in Anaheim, executives are developing a handbook for restaurant managers that translates key terms such as “charbroiler” and “thanks for doing a good job” from English to Spanish.
In 1990, these companies joined the effort to accommodate an increasingly multicultural work force. They are convinced that diversity is here to stay as minorities make up a larger portion of jobholders in the Southland.
That is increasingly true in Orange County. State labor data shows that minorities--Asians, Latinos, blacks and other ethnic groups--made up 33.3% of the county’s work force in 1989. That is up from 19.4% in 1980 and 12% in 1970.
Not only are minorities filling a large number of blue-collar jobs on the assembly lines, but they are also prevalent in engineering and computer areas as well as in health services, hotels and food service.
But with the change comes problems. Many of the Latinos and Asians are recent immigrants who find the American way of doing business, ranging from filling out forms to the emphasis on punctuality, difficult and frightening.
To ease the transition, more local companies are offering English courses to their workers and hiring private consultants to teach managers how to be more culturally sensitive. Also, some firms are establishing counseling programs to help minorities advance into management.
Joseph Karcher, director of human resources at Hughes Aircraft’s Ground Systems Group, said that previously, industry participated in affirmative action programs primarily because they were forced to comply with federal regulations. He said companies are now convinced that attracting and retaining minority workers is vital.
“Making the workplace conducive to minorities and women is seen as a way to gain a competitive advantage in a market where labor is scarce,” he said.
The language barrier is an obvious problem that firms are trying to address. John Nixon, assistant dean of continuing education at Rancho Santiago College in Santa Ana, said that, increasingly, the school is asked by industry to provide English classes at the job sites.
“Jobs are becoming more technical and requiring greater English fluency, while the adult work force is showing less and less ability to speak English fluently and to read and compute adequately,” he said.
Tom Walter, personnel director for SPS Technologies, a maker of precision aerospace fasteners, said the company will offer more English classes next year. He said that less than 6% of the Santa Ana firm’s workers are white and that the Asian workers alone speak 13 languages.
Walter said it is important that all his employees know English to maintain good production and safety practices. “There might not be someone to interpret a blueprint or job specification or to point out a safety hazard,” he said.
A number of other firms, including Emulex Corp., a Costa Mesa manufacturer of computer peripheral equipment, and AST Research Inc., a Fountain Valley maker of personal computers, also plan to introduce English classes for its workers next year.
Carl Karcher spokeswoman Patty Parks said the operator of the Carl’s Jr. hamburger chain will start offering English classes for its workers, 45% of whom are Latino. She said managers at the restaurants will be informed each week what their employees are learning so they can incorporate the lessons into their work.
Reaching beyond language, a growing number of companies are studying more subtle cultural differences with the aim of eliminating misunderstandings--even inadvertent insults--between co-workers of different ethnic backgrounds.
Cal State Fullerton recently began offering a one-semester course in multicultural management that attracted 23 participants, including representatives of Sav-On Drugs, General Dynamics Corp. and McDonnell Douglas.
Mikel Garcia, an applied anthropologist who teaches the course, said it is needed “because traditional training programs for managers don’t deal with cultural awareness. I teach strategies on how not to offend people so they can be productive.”
A common problem, she said, is that when Asian workers are asked whether they understand an instruction, they routinely answer “yes” because “in their culture it would be an offense to say no to anybody.” So Garcia teaches managers to ask questions in a way that requires more than a “yes” or “no” response.
Tru Miller operates a thriving consulting business in Laguna Beach that works with about 15 companies a day in Orange County. She started in 1984 teaching Spanish to managers and English to workers and about two years ago expanded into multicultural training.
A recent cross-cultural snafu she helped to resolve involved a manufacturing firm in Anaheim where Asian workers were offending other employees with pungent cooking odors when they microwaved “special kinds of fish and fish parts” in the lunchroom. That problem was rather easily overcome, she said, by requesting that the Asian employees precook the food at home.
“Unfortunately, often the way you come to cultural sensitivity is by making mistakes,” said Karcher at Hughes in Fullerton.
He said Hughes once rewarded Asians the same way it did whites--by singling out excellent workers for public praise. But he said after the ceremony the Asian workers “were withdrawn and concerned” because “their culture doesn’t accept individual rewards.” He learned that they instead would rather be applauded as members of a team.
Companies say they are trying to provide opportunity to minorities who want to climb the corporate ladder, in part because they in turn will better be able to supervise people with the same cultural background.
In Fullerton, Hughes has encouraged the establishment of “focus groups” for minorities and women in its labor force. The group discussions are aimed at the members helping each other obtain the training and guidance they need for advancement at Hughes.
“We have a lot of black employees that want to mentor and be mentored,” said James Young, section head in Hughes’ computer programming section and leader of the Black Forum. “The focus group is just a steppingstone to getting into the mainstream of the company.”
Changing Work Force The percentage of minorities in Orange County’s work force has increased dramatically over the past two decades. 1970 White*: 88% Minority**:12% 1980 White: 80.6% Minority: 19.4% 1989 White: 66.7% Minority: 33.3 *Excluding Latinos **Asians, blacks, Latinos and other ethnic groups Source: State Employment Development Department
