AUGUSTA, Maine — The Maine Human Rights Commission ruled Monday that the firing of a woman who was hit by a fellow employee was illegal and racist.
Massachusetts agency Employment on Demand hired Therese Nymahoro of Westbrook, who is black, to work as an assembly worker in Saco in May 2010. In the fall of 2010, “a co-worker punched her on the head. She pushed co-worker and asked for an explanation. Co-worker tapped her on the head again for a second and third time,” according to a response Nymahoro filed with the Human Rights Commission.
The co-worker told supervisors about the fight. Nymahoro told the Human Rights Commission she wanted to go to supervisors to tell them her side of the story, but her English was limited.
“By the time [the] company found an interpreter to help her explain her side of the story, [the] company had already decided to fire her,” the commission’s report states.
The company said it immediately fired both workers. But when it submitted payroll records to the Human Rights Commission, it showed that Nymahoro stopped getting paid in October, after the incident, but her Hispanic co-worker was paid for another month.
Most of the workers at the plant are Hispanic, according to Human Rights Commission documents.
“She was treated less favorabìy than co-worker because of her race/color. [Employment on Demand] states that both employees were involved in a physical aìtercation and yet only one of them, the one who is African-American, was terminated,” the investigator wrote.
The commission voted unanimously that Employment on Demand discriminated against Nymahoro because she is black, speaks Swahili and has limited ability to speak English. In such cases, both parties are encouraged to reconcile and reach a settlement. If conciliation fails, the complainant may file a civil lawsuit in Maine Superior Court, where a binding settlement can include monetary damages.
I’d buy her a BMW and put her in a corner office……it will be cheaper than going to court.
and apparently much cheaper than hiring an English speaking person in the first place. This company got what they paid for .
Once again a bully’s behavior was used to punish the victim, the matter of either party’s race not withstanding.
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The commission voted unanimously that Employment on Demand discriminated against Nymahoro because she is black, speaks Swahili and has limited ability to speak English.”
Sounds like she needed to be able to speak Spanish, but how many new languages can an immigrant be expected to learn?
Hope this company learns its lesson. Suspend employees first pending an investigation. This always works well and gives a company time to perform a proper investigation.
This happened to my mother. I told her to push back against it but she went and got a different job instead.
Careful, some of the fools here will jump all over you and claim your mother is an illegal alien.
It would seem bullying is a problem everywhere, starting with a lot of adults. In the workplace, neighborhood, schools. Anyone who goes along with a bully or enables a bullys behavior is just as bad as a bully. A waste of oxygen and groceries, they are.
Why is a Maine company not hiring Mainers?? I am very sure we have people who could use a job.. Also using a Mass. employment agency..
We don’t need this type business in Maine.
Everyone complains about people on welfare not working, yet will call me a racist for wanting Mainers to fill these jobs… Your wrong I just have something you don’t, common sense
It would seem that the woman is a Mainer. Her address in the article is said to be in Westbrook, ME. The agency while based in Mass. , probably has a branch in Maine as well, much like ManPower, or Bonnie Temps.
It seems like such a simple answer. In my opinion, immigration and labor laws are not enforced so that companies can hire and exploit unskilled workers that can’t complain because they are afraid and/ or don’t have a command on the language. This is not a Maine problem, it is a national problem.
This woman has my sympathy. Everyone needs to be treated with respect. Our tax dollars fund regulatory agencies that don’t seem to regulate much (Immigration, Banking, Food, Drug, Healthcare, oh and Anti-Trust Laws??). The fox is watching the hen-house folks.
Remember that the lobbyists in Washington are full time around the clock working for those that can afford to pay them to do so. Ire should be directed at elected officials and voting with consumer dollars by buying from companies that treat their workforce with respect and follow proper labor practices.
Are you proposing government intervention in free markets?
All I kept thinking as I read the story was, if you dont know English,you don’t belong in the American workforce. Other countries require immigrants to learn the native language,and America should do the same. Congress should pass a bill making English the official language of the USA.
Forcing people to learn English is big government telling people what to do. This is America, where nobody should be able to tell us what to do! What if I don’t want to learn English? Then I won’t! It’s the American way.
Unless you have ever tried to get a job outside of America without knowing their language, then you really have no right to comment. I am in agreement that a person moving to this country should have the respect for this country to learn its language just as if i moved to Italy, i would want to learn Italian.
You must be fairly young. In my lifetime I have known quite a few immigrants that had a hard time speaking english. What usually happens is that they have children who end up being their interpreters.
No that is not usually what happen’s. They usually learn English.
Usually their children learn English and then they learn a bit of it from their children. Many older people have a hard time learning a new language.
My grandfather who lived in Maine since he came here as an infant never learned English, his wife did from their children. They all spoke 2 languages eventually.
Ha ha! Who are you JeffCol, to take away people’s right to comment?
So what then? Should the company be required to pay for an interpreter to accommodate this woman? Or maybe all Americans should be required to learn the language of every immigrant that finds their way across our borders?
Many of the larger hospitals must have interpreters available 24/7 and they must cover many of the languages. At one hospital I was in, they had a staff of 43 interpreters (some on an on-call basis) and the one I met while there spoke 4 languages and her pay was in the $42,000/ year range (2010)(not in Maine). One more reason hospital costs are so high.
In this PC world the business will probably be required to pay for interpreters for non-english speaking workers.
It will eventually trickle down to clerks in Mom & Pop shops where the owners will HAVE to hire the non-english speaking clerk and an interpreter as well.
hold the phone. where is the employers responsibility? they hired this person because it was cheaper than paying an English speaking worker. they thought they’d save a few pennies. What’s the unemployment rate in Saco, anyway? Don’t blame people who show up to work when there are probably english speaking workers sitting idly at home collecting a check.
If the employer hires a non-english speaking employee, they have a responsibility to be able to communicate with that person.
How do you know it was cheaper to hire this woman? I would expect that for an illegal, but it seems she was a legal immigrant. If it’s a minimum wage job they would have to pay her that. How do you know that this company isn’t trying to help out immigrants coming to this country?
Trust me, I’m well aware of the dead beats in this state, and I’d commend her for trying to make her own way. I also think the language issue is getting out of hand in this country.
What makes more sense at this factory, the whole factory learning to speak Swahili or one woman learning to speak the language where she has decided to immigrate to? If the majority of the other workers are Mexican, they have already learned English, and should now have to learn Swahili also?
The employer has already given her a chance, it’s HER responsibility to be able to, or learn to communicate.
Then there are the immigrants who know English, but speak a different language in front of Americans because they think that you can’t understand what they’re saying.
How do you know it was cheaper to hire this woman?
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law of supply and demand. if it wasn’t cheaper, they wouldn’t have done it that way.
edited
LOL…what’s that mean?
“If the majority of the other workers are Mexican, they have already learned English, and should now have to learn Swahili also?”
How do you know that the majority of the Hispanic workers have learned English?
You’re all commenting on the assumption that all the Hispanics are here legally, which, I guess, is a legitimate assumption because we know they wouldn’t come here illegally.
Try getting a job in Quebec if you don’t speak French. They simply wont hire you. I know from experience.
I believe that if you aren’t a citizen of Quebec, you’ll not be hired in Quebec. That’s Canada and their situation Quebec v. the Rest of Canada is sort of unique.
If language were the criteria for entering the workforce in this county, our population would be well below 100 million. Untold millions of immigrants came here and helped build this nation to what it is today.
I agree that English should be the official language of the USA.
Wow, you must be wicked liberal if you think the federal govenrment should dictate what language we all speak!
Why English? The Indians were here first, shouldn’t we make everybody learn Micmac or Penobscot?
The French were here next. Anybody think we should make French the official language? There were more French people in Maine for the first hundred years after the Europeans got here, they thought that would last forever too. There are still some French speakers in Maine whose ancestors came here in the mid-1600s and early 1700s, long before there were many English speakers, but it doesn’t matter to you. You just think the language you speak should be the only one spoken. What do you tell the Indians and the French? Learn English?
So now the majority of the people speak English, and the ones with no sense of history think it will always be like that. The Romans thought everybody would always speak Latin, where would we be if the law still said everything had to be in Latin?
Like every person should do that comes to this country, learn and speak English. I thought this was our National language. Those that want to speak their own can with their own that understand them but the rest of us should not have to learn many different languages just to accomodate them.
We don’t have a national language. Each region in the US has a second language that may be spoken by more people than speak English.
And according to my in-laws from Michigan, ours is Mainah.
You could use a few English lessons yourself, Sparky.
“the rest of us should not have to learn many different languages”
Yes, this attitude will return the U.S. to it’s place of leadership in the world!!
Just because this woman cannot speak English does not mean she deserved to be punched in the head! What is wrong with you people?!
It seems that most posters, especially those promoting English only, are losing sight of the actual problem. A woman was abused on the job, and the abuser got better treatment than the victim! Apparently her English was adequate for the job, but not adequate for her to defend herself and explain the abuse that she experienced. And you want to make it an issue that somehow she is at fault because her English was limited?
As the daughter of an immigrant, and the adoptive mother of children who spoke another language, I am amazed at how hostile people are to those who are still learning English. It takes time! We left a church because an English only Sunday school teacher berated my daughters, to the point that they were in tears, for not speaking English. They had been here 3 months! How fluent would you be in another language at that point? And, since it was a church, what did she teach them of God’s love for all his children? She also berated them for not being able to state facts about Christianity, when they had spent their first 13 years in a former Soviet country with no religious instruction at all. It takes time! Be kind, be supportive, offer help! The world would be a better place if there were more kindness and acceptance.
The way this company treated her was unacceptable. I am glad that she won her case.
Since both workers participated in the fight and both were fired then I don’t see any issue or case for the worker. Unless the accusor can prove that the other worker was not fired and is still employed, (I imgaine the worker was on the books for the month to pay unpaid wages) then it’s not an issue. It’s annoying to watch the race card be played over and over again.
I guess I am an awful person, too, but it ticks me off when you see foreigners making millions of dollars playing sports in this country, and after a few years, do not have the courtesy to learn a little bit of english for their fans so that when they do an interview, you can understand them. It’s awful what they did to this lady (and what’s with the they mostly hire hispanics only), but for me, you want to earn the country’s dollar, learn some of its majority language. (Is English the majority still??). Goes for any country.
I cant believe how cruel people in this state have become. Almost all of the comments are about how unfair to YOU that you think it is that this woman cannot speak full English and nothing about her being punched in the head by someone at her place of work.
Seriously?