Friday 1 May 2009

The proverbial is bound to hit the fan...

An employee of Morrisons in Holyhead has been prevented form speaking Welsh at work according to Cymdeithas yr Iaith. The employee who has since left his job because of the policy said that he couldn't tolerate the situation any more.

Currently (with the Welsh Language LCO sitting on the WASC desks) there are no linguistic rights for Welsh speakers and so no legal avenues can be explored by the employee. But even the LCO only contains the freedom to speak Welsh in the workplace, not the right to speak Welsh in the workplace. This case will undoubtedly lead Cymdeithas yr Iaith to call for the LCO to be amended and strengthened, and will surely provide ammunition to those about to face scrutiny by the WASC about the LCO (a lot of abbreviations there sorry).

Going on past history (Thomas Cook anyone?) I can forsee a few picket lines outside Morrisons and I doubt the manager, who foolishly told this employee to stop speaking Welsh, will have foreseen what's likely to be coming his way.

Dewi Un

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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

mmmmm.....the LCO does not contain any such rights or freedoms...because they would come with subsequent measures. The LCO just seeks competance to legislate. I know you know this but not making that clear is just plain lazy.

And really, should we take a story from cymdeithas without trying to get the other sides POV. Not like they've got an agenda or anything is it?

Politics Cymru said...

Your right of course, the LCO only contains the scope for competence to make a measure, however given it's drafting that subsequent measure would only have power to make Welsh in work a freedom rather than a right.

With LCOs and measures being somewhat confusing i think for the purpose of the story there is no real need to distinguish in this case - some LCOs are drafted widely to allow scope for future measures - others like this one are drafted with a measure firmly in mind, therefore we can assume that what is contained in the LCO will pop up in a future measure.

To avoid confusion i purposefully didn’t distinguish the difference, because ultimately the story remains the same.

As for points of view - we don’t have the Morrisons line yet when we do you'll get to know about it1

Thanks for your comments

Keep it up!

Dewi Un

Anonymous said...

I think Morrisons should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves -and cymdeithas yr iaith should have a bloody agenda, if they didn’t protect the language who would

James Dowden said...

I hope some bigwigs at Morrisons realize that this manager has made an unfortunate mistake and reassign him.