Yep, sucking at the updates again. Go me! At least this time, I have a fairly good excuse: I’ve been just swamped with stuff for a new client. For example, I went to bed at 7a this morning, after rising at 10a (!) on Sunday, because I have been totally putting in the hours. Since this project is being billed by the hour, yay me.

Speaking of hourly work, I noticed something interesting on the walk to the bank today. There’s a take-out pizza joint a block from here, and they’ve put up three signs in the windows, each of which reads simply “Estamos empleando.” I asked, and this means: help wanted.

Now, for a bit of context, I would point out that I am not living in an especially Hispanic part of Chicago — not as far as I know, anyway. There certainly aren’t a bunch of billboards in Spanish as there in certain other parts of the city.

So why not put the sign in English, or perhaps both languages? I think two explanations are most likely. One, the owner/manager/hiring person has a personal preference/bias for Spanish-speakers, for whatever reason. That’s possible; I don’t know. Either that or, two, they don’t think English-speakers would even bother to apply.

I don’t know their motivation, but I do know I was in that place awhile ago and saw a worker leave with a pay stub. He had a girl waiting, and as he left the back he glanced at his stub and said to her: “Ouch. $70 for 12 hours.”

“Ouch” is right. That hurts no matter what language you speak.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 15th, 2006 at 11:56 pm and is filed under Business.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.