Story Created:
Mar 10, 2010 at 6:52 PM PST
Story Updated:
Mar 10, 2010 at 6:52 PM PST
Last week’s Bottom Line generated considerable interest in — and ignited some smoldering passions over — Assembly Bill 781, a little-known piece of state legislation that seeks to regulate the use of “bilingual preferred” designations on job applications and promotional opportunities.
The bill, promoted by the California NAACP, is entitled the Bilingual Hiring Requirements Bill, and is designed to curtail the arbitrary use of such terms as “Spanish-speaking” or “bilingual-preferred” on job postings, which the NAACP believes discriminates against non-Spanish-speaking and non-bilingual Californians of all ethnicities, in general, and African-American job seekers in particular, resulting in Black people having the highest unemployment rate in the state.
No Democratic legislator would touch the bill when the NAACP tried to get it introduced last year, so it was carried by Republican Assemblyman Kevin Jeffries of Lake Elsinore. The bill received not a single vote when it was brought before the Assembly Judiciary Committee last summer.
Since then, things have changed. Assembly Speaker Emeritus Karen Bass got in on the issue, causing tactics to be adjusted, the bill’s language to be tweaked, meetings to be held, fears to be allayed, misunderstandings to be corrected, legislators to be buttonholed and the dead bill to breathe new life.
Bass said she knew nothing about AB 781 until it failed in committee. “The NAACP did not come me about the bill they wanted to introduce. That’s what I’m there for — to make that happen,” Bass said. “If I have known about it, I never would have let that bill come up unless we had done all the work necessary to get it passed.”
Malaki Seku-Amen, legislative advocate for the state NAACP, said he tried to get to Bass with the bill, but her staff kept him from her. “They didn’t want her to deal with anything controversial. They kept me from discussing it with her and they obviously kept her from reading it,” Seku-Amen said. “After a while, I had to move on and try to enlist the aid and support of others in the Legislature.
“I took the bill’s defeat in committee as a sign that we needed to do more work. Maybe I could have done a better job of bypassing her staff and getting to the Assembly speaker,” Seku-Amen mused.
Following that defeat, the angry Bass assigned her staff to work directly with Seku-Amen to resurrect AB 781. Toward that end, some language in the bill was rewritten and meetings were convened by the NAACP with more than 20 organizations which are stakeholders in the issues of truth, justice and equality.
“We brought together in the capital multi-ethnic, civil rights, social justice and immigration groups for discussions about making sure that nobody in this state is discriminated against — not limited English-speakers, not non-Spanish speakers, not anybody,” Seku-Amen said. “We got a consensus on this issue and support for the bill from these groups.”
Bass has gotten Democrats and Republicans to agree to move the bill forward and it now sits in the Senate Judiciary Committee awaiting a hearing date.
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