Speaking Their Languages

Employing Polyglot Workforce Creates Benefits, Challenges

Soon after he arrived at the upscale Wegmans Food Markets store in Dulles last year, executive chef Llewellyn Correia discovered that many of the 120 employees he supervised had not been attending the company's mandatory safety and sanitation classes.

The reason, he said: "The courses were in English, and many of my employees don't speak English."

Correia said some of his Asian cooks needed training in U.S. food handling standards, which are more rigorous than the ones in their home countries and more likely to be enforced by government inspectors. "It's very hard to break old habits," he said.

The lack of training, he said, also was raising safety issues among some employees who were posing a danger to themselves and their co-workers. "We had lots of issues like slips and falls," he said.

Today, the Dulles Wegmans offers a Web-based version of its safety and sanitation courses in Mandarin and Spanish, in addition to English -- just one nod the supermarket says it is making to a multilingual workplace in which more than 200 of its 650 employees do not speak English as their primary language.

In a region with one of the nation's lowest unemployment rates, managers at large retailers such as the Dulles Wegmans say hiring immigrant workers makes good business sense, filling low-paying jobs that many U.S.-born workers don't want with employees motivated to move up through the ranks as they learn the language. With English speakers, "You train somebody and -- boom -- they leave. You lose a lot of money actually training people," Correia said.

Having a polyglot workforce can also boost sales and build loyalty among non-English-speaking customers who can ask a question -- Are the Pepsi 12-packs still on sale? -- in their native tongues.

But it also means grappling with such management challenges as how to ensure that a miscommunication does not lead to an accident or regulatory violation, give orders to employees who speak far better Tagalog than English, or help people who once lived two oceans apart work together behind the same deli counter.

"Sometimes it's tough. You know, the one-on-one communication, getting your point across," Mike Provo, a Dulles Wegmans manager, said as he surveyed a row of cashiers whose first languages were Arabic, Farsi, Spanish, Hindi and Urdu. "It takes a little bit more time and a little bit more effort and patience."

Numbers released Dec. 1 by the Virginia Employment Commission help explain why large retailers are snapping up workers who speak virtually no English.

The unemployment rate fell to 1.9 percent in Loudoun County, home to the Dulles Wegmans, and 2.3 percent in Northern Virginia, according to the commission's most recent data, for October. In the world of employment, anything below 2 percent is considered a worker shortage. The Washington region tied Minneapolis-St. Paul for the lowest employment rate -- 3.1 percent -- among the nation's 367 metropolitan areas.

With fewer people looking for work, non-English speakers are in more demand, said economist Stephen S. Fuller, who tracks employment trends as director of George Mason University's Center for Regional Analysis.