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Market, airport put diversity to work
You can tell how diverse the work force at Your DeKalb Farmers Market must be just by looking at the variety of eggplants in the produce section.
Sicilian, Japanese, Indian and Thai are some of the more than half-dozen varieties offered at the 140,000-square-foot Decatur market.
Other items you might see in a cart there that you won't find in your local chain supermarket include duck feet, lotus root and brown teff flour, milled from an Ethiopian grain. Many offerings like these are on the shelves as a direct result of employee suggestions.
According to owner Robert Blazer, he didn't set out to create an employee base that looks like the United Nations. But as his work force reflected the waves of immigrants moving to central DeKalb County over the years, he found it was good for business. Not only does his market accommodate customers who speak any of dozens of languages, but also employees constantly give advice about new products that appeal to people from around the globe.
"It makes the market more of a world market," Blazer said. "I enjoy having people here from all over the world, because it's an educational experience for everybody."
While many large companies are promoting cultural and ethnic sensitivity through formalized training programs, employers with much more diverse work forces seem to take it as a given that everyone will get along.
Blazer says conflicts between workers are few at the market.
"That doesn't happen, surprisingly," he said. "Employees work side by side with people whose countries have been at war with one another."
At Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport's Concourse E, travelers from across the globe are assisted by interpreters who, collectively, can speak more than three dozen languages. The workers are mostly foreign nationals, said John Green, vice president of TBI Airport Management, a company contracting with U.S. customs.
"Since these are mostly foreign nationals coming in from other countries, they are already familiar with their cultures," Green said. "So we don't need to give specific training on arriving passengers."
More often, it seems, it is when one cultural or ethnic group becomes concentrated in a workplace that some training or education is called for.
For example, a cultural conflict arose several years ago when groups of Somali Muslim workers at a couple of Atlanta factories weren't allowed to leave the processing line for prayer breaks. The Somalis, who must pray five times a day, eventually were given a special area to pray.
Al Vivian, president of the Fayetteville consulting firm Basic Diversity, said the hiring practices at the market and at the airport make good business sense.
"Who better to understand a culture than the people who are from that culture?" Vivian said. "You hire people from different countries, and it shows respect."
Vivian said it's in companies' self-interest to reach out to workers who keep the place running. He cites recent consulting work he did for a poultry company that was worried about turnover among its Mexican workers. The turnover was causing increased retraining expenses.
"I told them, 'When people see that you're making a step toward them, they'll make a step toward you,' " Vivian said. "So I said they should offer English classes. And the management should take Spanish classes so the workers would see they're trying to take a step toward them."
Vivian said the turnover was often a result of Mexican workers coming to the United States without their families to work for a year or so before returning home. The same worker often would come back to earn higher wages than are available in Mexico.
"If they're moving back and forth, I wondered what the company was doing to help them acclimate," Vivian said. "Usually, big companies have government contacts, so I suggested they try to find a way to bring the relatives here so they could stay legally."
Green said he finds a ready, multilingual work force in metro Atlanta.
"The international community here is large," he said. "But sometimes, when we need people who speak specific languages, we contact the local universities."
Blazer said he relies on word of mouth to staff his market and then relies on the new workers to help stock his store.
"We're getting more people from the African continent than ever before, and we've also had a lot of new people from Eastern Europe," he said. "And everybody seems to be at ease working with all these different people."
