UAW Vote: Yes In Any Language

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.theday.com/re.aspx?re=49c971bd-2d4e-4621-b39a-1c8219e7f9eb

By David Collins, Published on 1/18/2008

TO THINK THAT SOMEONE could have been working as a dealer at Foxwoods Resort Casino last year and not have known there was a vote to unionize would be like suggesting that someone could have been in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and not noticed the water rising.

I'm pretty sure I could find kindergartners around here who knew that the United Auto Workers were trying to organize dealers at Foxwoods.

And yet labor lawyers for the Mashantucket Pequots have been pitching this blind monkey argument all week to an administrative law judge with the National Labor Relations Board, trying to overturn the dealers' 1,289-to-852 vote to unionize.

So many of the Chinese-speaking dealers at Foxwoods know so little English, the tribe's legal team suggests, that they couldn't have been properly notified of the election or understood the yes and no check boxes on the ballot, which was printed only in English.

The trouble is that the Chinese dealers the tribe put on the witness stand in an NLRB hearing room in Hartford, assisted by a translator, seemed only to reinforce common sense, that anyone licensed to deal a complicated table game in a busy Connecticut casino with English-speaking customers could figure out a simple union election.

A few of the witnesses proved themselves not quite as mono-lingual as presented, answering, at times, questions posed in English before they were even translated. One dealer even acknowledged that the 100-question final exam in her Foxwoods training to become a dealer was in English.

FULL story at link.