[lg policy] Milwaukee: Under pressure, owner of Milwaukee custard stand ends English-only policy

[Harold Schiffman]

Under pressure, owner of Milwaukee custard stand ends English-only policy
Published June 03, 2016
Fox News Latino <http://latino.foxnews.com/index.html>

   - [image: milwauke custard.jpg]

A tense standoff between a popular Milwaukee custard stand and civil rights
activists over the business’s “English-only” policy has been resolved.

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.

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.

"She whispered to him in Spanish, 'I'm not allowed to speak Spanish to
you,'" Sanchez said, according to Fox6 News
<http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2016/05/19/milwaukee-frozen-custard-stand-under-fire-over-english-only-policy/>
.

Sanchez, who was next in line, also placed his order in Spanish and
received the same response.

"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.

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.

"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.”

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.

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.
"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, according to the
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
<http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/latino-organization-says-dispute-with-custard-stand-resolved-b99737290z1-381715211.html>

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