City Market in Burlington signed an agreement with the co-op’s union on Monday in response to allegations of an unofficial-but-enforced “English-only policy” at the cooperative grocery store.
The co-op agrees to allow all Onion River Co-op employees to speak their native language with other employees and the co-op will offer cultural competency training, said Pat Burns, general manager.
“What we are saying is that we need to do what we thought we were trying to do better,” Burns said Monday evening at a board meeting.
On Friday, Burns met with community groups seeking to change what they considered to be a policy requiring workers to speak English, according to a statement on the store’s website.
The union representing City Market employees, UE Local 203, filed a grievance against the co-op alleging that several native African employees were asked by the management to speak English for safety reasons.
The co-op later stated it encouraged workers to speak English in order “gain fluency, improve customer service, enhance opportunities for promotion, and to help ensure a comfortable work environment no matter which languages our employees speak.” Co-op officials say there was no written policy enforcing language restrictions.
An agreement emerged when Burns met with the community delegation – including representatives from the union, the Vermont Committee for Change, the Vermont Peace and Justice Center and the Vermont Workers’ Center – to establish a policy allowing workers to speak their native language when talking to one another.
James Haslam, director of the Workers’ Center, said he was encouraged by the meeting.
“It seems like things are going in the right way, they are going to move forward with this policy,” he said.
