<div dir="ltr"><h1 id="article-title" itemprop="name">Under pressure, owner of Milwaukee custard stand ends English-only policy</h1>
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Published June 03, 2016<div itemprop="sourceOrganization" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization"><a itemprop="name" href="http://latino.foxnews.com/index.html">Fox News Latino</a></div></div>
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<p>A tense standoff between a popular Milwaukee custard stand and
civil rights activists over the business’s “English-only” policy has
been resolved.</p>
<p>The owner of Leon's Frozen Custard on Milwaukee’s heavily Latino
south side will now permit employees to speak with customers in the
patron’s desired language and will also conduct a review of its
personnel polices to make sure the business is in compliance with civil
rights laws and federal guidelines.</p>
<p>Tensions first rose in May when Leon’s customer Joey Sanchez
overheard one of the custard joint’s employees interacting with a
Spanish-speaking customer.</p>
<p>"She whispered to him in Spanish, 'I'm not allowed to speak Spanish to you,'" Sanchez said, <a target="_blank" href="http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2016/05/19/milwaukee-frozen-custard-stand-under-fire-over-english-only-policy/">according to Fox6 News</a>.</p>
<p>Sanchez, who was next in line, also placed his order in Spanish and received the same response.</p>
<p>"I'm trying to understand or find the why. I need to hear from him to
hear why he has this policy," Sanchez said of the custard stand’s
owner, Ron Schneider.</p>
<p>For his part, Schneider argued that the policy of only speaking
English had been in place for decades, and there had never been a
problem before.</p>
<p>"Any foreign language is going to be a problem,” Schneider said.
“What I'm trying to avoid is when people come up here [and] get waited
on in a different language, because there happens to be an employee who
speaks that language.”</p>
<p>The controversy prompted the League of United Latin American Citizens
(LULAC) of Wisconsin to ask the federal Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission (EEOC) to investigate the business.</p>
<p>Schneider has responded by saying that he encourages his employees to
speak English as much as possible, but does not forbid them from
speaking Spanish – or any other language – if a customer can’t
communicate otherwise. He added that while he prefers that his employees
speak English to each other, he is not going to stop them from speaking
Spanish.</p>
"We appreciate the goodwill ownership has demonstrated in working
with us to bring this issue to a close to the benefit of our community,"
LULAC Wisconsin director Arturo Martinez said in a news release, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/latino-organization-says-dispute-with-custard-stand-resolved-b99737290z1-381715211.html">according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel</a><img style="margin: 4px 0px 0px 4px;" src="http://global.fncstatic.com/static/v/all/img/external-link.png"><br clear="all"><br>-- **************************************<br><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to its members<br>and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner or sponsor of the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who disagree with a message are encouraged to post a rebuttal, and to write directly to the original sender of any offensive message. A copy of this may be forwarded to this list as well. (H. Schiffman, Moderator)<br><br>For more information about the lgpolicy-list, go to <a href="https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/" target="_blank">https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/</a><br>listinfo/lgpolicy-list<br>*******************************************</div>
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