Lofty Pastures

I have been on this roller-coaster ride in the past… well, probably for the past year at least. I put it down to working with culturally and linguistically diverse people employed at fairly high corporate level jobs. As a teacher of English as a second language, my job is to help them in their job by improving their language skills. But, it has started to feel like there are a lot of managers asking me to make their employees fit into their workplace better and perform in the way they expect. There seems to be very little self-reflection on the behalf of the managers on how they might be able to change to manage their multi-cultural team.

This leads me to disturbing feelings of Australia’s past destructive relationship with assimilation and a general closed mindedness.

It’s an overall feeling that comes from the subtlety and sometime not so subtle comments around managers who expect their staff members to have ‘native level’ or ‘perfect’ English. I have heard managers say things like: “your English is great and very fluent, but in our field our clients would expect you to have perfect English...”. This kind of comment tells me that the manager is the one who feels that his employee should have ‘perfect’ English and is, therefore, embarrassed or ashamed to put the staff member out in front of their client. On a number of occasions I have asked the manager if they have had any complaints or comments from the clients, to which the answer is consistently no and it is just their observations. How is it that a manager would assume that their client would expect ‘perfect’ English?

This stuff is always a bit fluffy because there are no absolutes or rules where language is concerned and impressions are all we have to go by. But I always remember the study done by Australian National University where they sent out 4000 resumes all the same except for the name at the top of them. The names were diverse and in an array of Chinese, Middle Eastern, Anglo Saxon, Indigenous and Italian. The result was that Chinese applicants need to send 68% more applications, 64% for Middle Eastern applicants and surprisingly only 35% for Indigenous applicants.

I don’t find it hard to believe at all that this type of inhibitive racism is keeping culturally and linguistically diverse employees down. It seems that it might even be in the interest of the white employee / manager to unfairly suppress the more than satisfactory language levels of their subordinates so as to keep them believing their perceived inferiority. Is the privilege here that it also artificially inflate their own aptitude for the job where they can securely graze in those lofty pastures?