Employer Sanctions: 27) conducted a carefully designed statistical study
of a stratified random sample of employers nationwide, and reported that
10 percent of their sample, or 461,000 companies employing millions of
persons, openly, if naively admit that they “discriminated on the basis of a
person’s foreign appearance or accent” (ibid.: 38). In hiring audits
specifically designed to detect discrimination on the basis of accent
(telephone inquiries about advertised jobs), such discrimination was found
to be prevalent (ibid.).^9 This behavior was documented again in Carroll v.
Elliott Personnel Services (1985), when an employment agency
receptionist was directed by her manager to screen all persons inquiring
over the telephone: to those who did not “speak right,” the job was closed.
Carroll was also told to make notations about the caller’s speech and
accent. Carroll sued on the grounds that her employer was compelling her
to break the law, and she won her case.
There are a number of possible reasons for the low number of
documented cases, some of which include:
employers who discriminate may do so in a sophisticated and
subtle way;
the persons discriminated against are so accustomed to this
treatment that they no longer react;
if they are aware of the treatment, they may not know that they
have legal recourse, or how to pursue it;
complaints are handled internally or mediated by an outside
party, and resolved before litigation becomes necessary.Of course, many discriminated against on the basis of language may not
find anything surprising or wrong about that fact. This is, after all, not the
only society in the world that promotes a standard language ideology.
The bulk of the burden seems to fall, predictably, on the disenfranchised
and the unassimilated. Cutler claims that the manner of enforcement of
Title VII “permits an employer to reject qualified applicants of a
particular national origin as long as he hires more assimilated applicants
of the same origin instead” (Cutler 1985: 1164).