Wednesday

This one in english

earlier today I talked about two things that were running through my mind, I left out the third thing, now I want to talk about it.
It's a work related thing, and I'm incensed. I'm not directly involved but damn, I am not happy about what I've heard.
Yesterday, Tuesday, two separate Tibetan ladies came to me and told me about what is going on in the department that I was the manager of 3 years ago, both of them worked under me , as well as the perpetrator of the outrage that they told me about. She is now the manager of the hand painting department, the perpetrator of this , to me, heinous act.
As of yesterday no one in this department is allowed to speak anything but English, even in private conversation. Why? Because this manager can't understand what is being said around her.
Today, I had the ears of the Couple that own the factory, a not common situation, we were discussing something that I was working on, but I could not let the opportunity pass. I asked, " uumm, so people are not allowed to talk their native language in the hand painting department, what's that all about? The wife of the pair that own the business was truly surprised to hear this, the husband tried to be surprised, but obviously was not. He went on to inform me that there had been problems with the Tibetan women getting together and just sitting there bitching. Okay thinks Lars to himself, you just racial profiled an ethnic group, not to mention gender profiled. He then went on to say, well Jennifer has asked that she should not get any more Tibetans in her department. Okay says the Lars to himself, once again racial profiling.
How far should Lars pursue this injustice? There is a history here where Lars was mobbed by this woman and a few others and lost his position, obviously a furthering of this story.
Given the information thus far, what do you guys think?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I will comment this later ... i promise ... and the other things aswell, but i really have to hurry now

Zing

Anonymous said...

ok i´m still at work, but i decided to take a break and since i know the problem of different languages in your work environment i just have to comment this, in my opinion it is not very polite to talk in a language the other person may not understand in a business content, nevertheless you cannot interdict someone to use his mother tounge in private conversation. I have this situation quite often that customers talk in different languages that i do not understand and i have to say that i don´t feel very comfortable when they do this while i´m in the room etc. but i have to deal with it.
The other thing is that once a couple of canadians tried to talk in french discussing something that they didn´t want me to understand ... i think they were quite pissed when they eventually found out i understood them the whole freaking time as i took "french leave"

Zing

Lars said...

Zing, I can understand wanting to understand what is being said in your vicinity. I can't undestand though that the People in upper management and Human resources would allow such open racism to happen here in the workplace, we are supposed to be a very open and accepting company. It is not uncommon though that the two Men who make the top decisions hear only what certain Female employees have to say and don't think things through, I've been with the company for 16 or 17 years, I've seen things like this happen before, I'm never going to get over being suprised by the stupid things that happen though.