Jul. 18, 2003 - One of Colorado's premier casinos has agreed to pay more than $1.5 million to 36 former housekeepers who claimed the company ordered them not to speak Spanish on the job, even among themselves. 

Managers at the Colorado Central Station casino in Black Hawk, owned until April by Nevada-based Anchor Coin, required employees to sign statements indicating they would speak only English while working. 

The workers were informed they would be disciplined if they violated the policy, even though the company knew many of them didn't speak English when they were hired, said Evangelina Hernandez, a lawyer for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which represented many of the workers in their case against the casino. 

"Managers would see a couple of Hispanic employees and walk by and say 'English-only' or 'No Spanish' in order to, you know, remind them," Hernandez said. 

"But it created an environment where people were afraid; they didn't feel good about themselves," she said. 

As a result of the policy, most of the housekeepers quit or transferred to other departments in the casino that didn't have or didn't enforce the language provision, Hernandez said. 

The complaint charged the company violated federal anti-discrimination laws. The company and the workers' representatives will sign a settlement before a federal judge today. 

The case is one of a growing number of English-only discrimination suits nationwide, according to EEOC data. The suits are the result of more restrictive language policies by private employers and more active opposition by worker groups. 

"We have several of these kinds of cases ongoing in the office right now," Hernandez said. "If you've got a compelling reason to require English to be spoken, fine. But like many others we're seeing, there was no reason to keep them from speaking Spanish all the time." 

Federal law allows companies to limit employees to speaking English only if they have a compelling business purpose. Most of the housekeepers had little contact with casino clients, and the policy applied even to casual conversation while the workers were on the job, according to depositions in the case. 

The settlement requires the casino's new owner, Isle of Capri, to train managers in how to better deal with non-English-speaking employees and how to handle discrimination complaints. Isle of Capri terminated the English-only policy when it took over the casino this spring, Hernandez said. 

Twenty-five of the workers represented by the EEOC will split $315,000 in the settlement of the class-action suit. Another 11 workers who filed individual suits will split $1.21 million. 

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(c) 2003, The Denver Post. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.