The World comes to the American Workplace
Tight Labor Market and A Surge in Immigration Bring New Diversity

By Kirstin Downey Grimsley
Washington Post Staff Writers

This news article appeared in the Washington Post on Saturday, March 20, 1999

Upstairs, in the Washington Hilton’s grand ballroom, hundreds of lobbyists, publicists and journalists were converging for a gala awards dinner one recent evening. Downstairs, in the hotel’s labyrinthine underground kitchen, hundreds of workers were getting ready, including eight gathered around a metal table preparing salads for the banquet.

Working together in a brisk assemble line, placing vegetables on the plates and moving them onto rolling metal racks were Grace Appiah, of Ghana; Carl Jorgensen, of Bolivia; Ayad Al-Said, of Iraq; Robert Evans, an African American born in Atlanta; Keooudone Xaynhamad, of Laos; and Austrian Herman Mueller, assistant executive chef, monitored their process.

Vietnamese immigrant Kim Nguyen used hand signals to show Sonia Vargas, a recent arrival from Bolivia, who speaks no English, how to artistically splay slices of red and yellow pepper, tomato slices and California greens across the plate, leaving an open space for the dish’s centerpiece, a phyllo dough basket filled with Gorgonzola cheese, caramelized onions and spinach.

Nguyen, 40 shook her head as she wordlessly showed Vargas, 22, how to arrange the salad greens on the plates. "Sometimes it’s difficult because they don’t speak much English," Nguyen said, speaking with her own heavy accent.

A tight labor market and a recent surge in immigration have created rapid changes in many workplaces here and around the country. For awhile people often find ways to cluster with others like themselves at home, in their neighborhoods, at worship and at school, the need to make a living forces people from widely varied backgrounds to get along day after day.

The result is an American workplace that in some places resembles a modern-day Tower of Babel, presenting multiple opportunities for miscommunications and misunderstanding, as people seek to work together across steep barriers of language, culture, gender and economic class, and racial, educational and religious differences. Female managers supervise men who come from countries where women’s activities are restricted; high school dropouts instruct former college professors; immigrants who speak only Spanish work alongside those who only speak Vietnamese; Bosnians work along Serbs.

Along with the inevitable conflicts, many mangers and workers interviewed described how this new diversity also yields occasions of laugher, learning and creativity among people from different worlds.

"It’s surprising how well things work," said Tom Meyer, vice president of restaurant development for Clyde’s Restaurant Group, which employees about 1,400 people, more than a third of whom are immigrants. "The level of tolerance is quite remarkable. …. There is a real spirit of helping. People have a common goal."

New Ways of Managing

The change has been particularly dramatic in the hotel and restaurants business, which relies on a steady stream of able-bodies, low wage-workers. William Edwards, general manager at the Hilton, recalled that when he was last hired there as a dishwasher in 1971 after a stint in the military, there were three main groups--- Whites, Blacks and Hispanics. Almost all the mangers were white men, with names like "Jones, Edwards and Smith," he recalled, and there were only two languages at work, English and Spanish.

Now, the workers at the Hilton speak at least 36 languages, and some speak no English at all. To communicate with the staff, Edwards has memos translated into five languages and read aloud to workers who are illiterate. It’s a different world for supervisors, he said, and requires them to manage in entirely new ways.

"Just set aside what business school teach--- the MBA in finance or computer literacy," said Edwards, whose staff is 65 percent foreign-born. "If you don’t have empathy and aren’t able to communicate in diversity, or are uncomfortable around a multicultural work force, or if you are not confident enough to give an opportunity to someone who has a heavy accent or is different, you’ll be a miserable failure as a manager."

Workers describe much bigger personal challenges as they cope with the shock of a new culture.

"I told my wife that when we came here it was like we had to be born anew," said Hilton steward coordinator Emilio Paulino, who moved to the United States from the Dominican Republic five years ago. "We had to learn to walk, to speak and to eat in the American way," he said.

Each day brings new dilemmas, such as how to handle religious differences. At the Hilton, for example, growing contingents are Moslem women. Celene Castellucci, the hotel’s assistant director of housekeeping, said the Moslem workers complained that it was very difficult to take their normal lunch break in the employee cafeteria, surrounded by food smells, during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, when Moslems fast from sunup to sundown. They asked her if during Ramadan they could instead work through lunch and leave earlier.

Castellucci agreed, and the women were pleased. But, Castellucci said, she later caught some flak for her decision from fellow managers who said other workers would try to take advantage of the situation.

"Any time you do something in a union house, there is danger of setting precedent," she said.

Other hotels have found creative solutions to different workers’ needs. At Host Marriott Services Corp. headquarters in Bethesda, for example, a separate room has been set aside for Moslem employees who need a private setting to place their prayer rugs when they pray to Mecca several times each day. At other times, the space doubles as a lactation room for working mothers who breast-feed their infants and need a place to privately express milk.

"It’s a dual-purpose room," said Donna Klein, vice president of work force effectiveness at Marriott, explaining how co-workers post a schedule to let people know when it is breast-pumping time and when it is prayer time.

Communication Barriers

Language, of course, is the biggest potential barrier. Many workers cross the hurdle in ingenious ways. Some rely on guesswork. Hilton seamstress Lenora Ward, an African American from North Carolina, for example, dispenses and alters uniforms for employees. But many of the workers come from countries where measurements are taken differently and they can’t tell her what size they wear. So Ward looks them up and down and tries to gauge it on her own. "I can usually guess their size," she said.

Sometimes workers rely on the sense of touch. The Hilton’s Castellucci recalled trying to express her condolences to an employee from Bosnia whose son has just been killed on the fighting there.

"I tried to say I was sorry," Castellussi said. "She grabbed my arms. She had tears in her eyes. We understood each other, although she didn’t speak a word of English."

Gesturing is common, often accompanied by a single word or two of broken English, many workers and supervisors said. "Our supervisor doesn’t know much English, but when he points at a can and says ‘trash,’ they know what he wants them to do," Paulino said.

Harri On, a Vietnamese waiter at the Hilton, relies on the written word. He speaks with such a heavy accent that he often cannot be understood when he speaks in English. So instead, when asked a question, he responds in writing, in careful, elegant script.

Informal channels of communication, outside the normal chains of command, usually emerge. In the Hilton’s pastry department, for example, Concepcion Carrillo is the conduit who explains to the other Hispanics workers what needs to be done. In housing keeping, it’s Evelyn Marshall, an African American woman who speaks only English. Co-workers say she has an uncanny ability to communicate by tone of voice that allows her to convey even complex thoughts to non-English speakers.

Ethiopian-born Atlabachew Aklilu, assistant food and beverage director at the Hilton, whose father was once vice-mayor of Addis Ababa but whose family fled political unrest there, plays the role of mentor to the approximately 100 Ethiopian workers in the hotel, even those who don’t report to him. "They feel comfortable coming to me," Aklilu said.

Some companies hire multiple translators. For example, Marriott’s nationwide employee assistance program hot line offers counseling services in 15 languages.

Many job seekers who do not speak English bring their own translators-- usually an English-speaking friend or relative-- to help them fill out job applications or answer interview questions, managers said.

But usually it’s the workers themselves who find ways around seemingly insurmountable communication barriers. At the Hilton, for example, the former head of the landscaping department is deaf and mute and reads lips in English. His two co-workers were a Central American man who spoke little English and a hard-of-hearing Turkish man who spoke little English and no Spanish.

"I’m deaf and he’s deaf too, so it’s perfect," said Oktay Guney, from Istanbul, laughing as he explained how they relied on lip reading, hand gestures and a shared knowledge of what needed to be done each day to keep up the Hilton’s lawns.

Sometimes there are even language barriers between people who appear to share a language. Jorgensen, who works in the chef’s department, was born in Bolivia and speaks Spanish, but said he is frequently stumped by the unfamiliar accents and vocabularies of other Hispanics immigrants. "Sometimes I don’t understand them because there are like English, lots of kinds of Spanish," he said.

Accents can raise hackles, too. Elroy Blanco, the Hilton’s executive steward, was born in Spain, and he speaks with a lisping Castilian accent that is associated with the Spanish nobility. But Castilian Spanish carries a negative connotation for Mexican workers because of centuries of offensiveness to some Mexicans," Blanco said, adding that he intentionally tones down his accent at work.

Then there’s a steady stream of small misunderstanding, like when one employee says, "30" and a co-worker who speaks another language hears it as "13."

"You need to take time and repeat things," said Hilton pastry chef Phillip Samuel, an immigrant from the Caribbean nations of Trinidad and Tobago. "You need to say 3-0. We have little problems like that."

Or there was the time a Hispanic waiter at the Hilton, serving a late-night dinner, asked if the guest wanted a beverage with "gas" or "without gas," which in Spanish means carbonation.

Some miscommunications are tragic. At a Marriott hotel in Los Angles, a well-liked and diligent Spanish-speaking housekeeper retired after 25 years, Klein said. On her last day, she asked the management when she would receive her first pension check. But it had never been adequately explained to her in Spanish that the chain’s retirement system required her to voluntarily invest in the company’s profit-sharing plan, Klein said.

"They were heartbroken," Klein said.

Meetings can be particularly difficult, as when workers who speak only one language are unable to understand workers who only speak another language.

At a recent meeting of the Hilton’s steward’s department, for example, hotel executives surprised the workers with a buffet luncheon to thank them for their hard work during the National Prayer Breakfast, one of the hotel’s most prestigious annual events. The group, including Hispanics, Vietnamese, Middle Easterners and Bosnians, filed into the room for the meeting. Only about four of the 70 workers were born in the United States. Although the workers smiled, joked and nodded to the each other as they entered the room, most chose to sit at tables with others of their same ethnic group.

Blanco thanked the workers for their hard work in English and Spanish, but conducted much of the meeting in Spanish. At several point, English speakers interrupted, sometimes in irritated tones, with requests for information to be repeated in English, or asked him to explain something they missed after he has moved on to another topic. A Hispanic woman asked pointedly in Spanish about vacation hours to be paid during a holiday week, but ignored the explanation by the union steward in the room, who answered her questions in English. An Arabic-speaking employee demanded to know why the Spanish-speaking employees weren’t made to speak English.

Meanwhile, the Vietnamese workers, sitting together at one side of the room, began chatting among themselves, ignoring the meeting still underway. The discussion dragged on, as questions and answers were repeated in multiple languages.

Blanco urges the workers to continue cooperating with each other. "We are a family," he told them. "A family helps one another, or we will be destroyed."

Overcoming Animosities

Sometimes deep animosities prove too deep for some workers to overcome. At a Marriott hotel on Atlanta, for example, a Vietnamese-speaking Cambodian supervisor appeared to be capably managing a staff composed mainly of Vietnamese immigrants—until another Cambodian on the staff told managers about problems in the department.

"We found out the supervisor was purposefully misinterpreting personnel policies to a Vietnamese employee to force her out of her job," said Marriott’s Klein. "We learned this supervisor had no forgiveness in her heart for Vietnamese based on her history. Vietnamese had killed her entire family."

Culture differences even force managers to find different ways to thank workers for a job well done, said Brendan M. Keegan, executive vice president of human resources for Marriott International Inc. Eastern Europeans, they’ve found, are put off by plaques and photographs of people as "Employee of the Month," because they say it reminds them of meaningless propaganda techniques employed by Communist regimes in the past. And Marriott has found that some workers from Asian and Latin American don’t like to be singled out for praise or acknowledgment in front of an assembled group because they come form a cultural traditional where standing out is seen as boastful.

Some of the immigrant workers need to be given specific instructions about things that seem ordinary or self-explanatory to native-born American, managers say. For example, at the Old Ebbitt Grill, a waiter from Ghana, unfamiliar with American condiments, was asked to bring mayonnaise for a customer’s sandwich— so he brought out a gallon tub and placed it on the table in front of her.

These are among the challenges resulting from a surge in immigration over the last decades. A recent study of 1998 census data found that the number of immigrants living in the United State had almost tripled since 1970 to 26.3 million—accounting for nearly one in 10 residents, the highest proportion in seven decades.

And for all the potential pitfalls, several managers and workers interviewed said they learn to get along because they have to. Or as Francisco Peralta, 56, a banquet waiter from Nicaragua who works at the Hilton, explained, "It’s like my wife and me," he said. "We’re fighting every day, and then at night we sleep in the same bed."

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