Employers must deal with diverse U.S. labor force

One in five people in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas spoke Spanish at home in 2007, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Nationwide, the number of foreign-born residents reached an all-time high of 38.1 million last year, representing 12.6 percent of the U.S. population.

Naturally, coastal areas had the highest proportion of foreign born residents, including California with 27.4 percent, 21.8 percent in New York, 19.9 percent in New Jersey, 19.4 percent in Nevada and 18.9 percent in Florida.

The Midwest is less mobile, with 70.3 percent of us still living in the state in which we were born.

But the "internationalization" of America continues to make itself felt here in the heartland, as witnessed by the labor dispute at the JBS Swift & Co. plant in Grand Island.

If you haven't been following it, here's the short version:

A group of Muslim employees, most of them Somali immigrants, walked off the job Monday, saying they weren't being allowed to pray during their holiest month, Ramadan, which occurs in September this year.

Attempting to be sensitive to their religious preferences, plant management shifted the workers' break times close to sundown, one of the times they are required to pray.

But that left others to cover their work, plus there were rumors the Muslim workers were paid for the time they had walked out, and the results were predictable.

Wednesday, hundreds of other employees, mostly Christian and white, Hispanic, Vietnamese and African-American, walked out.

Thursday, management rescinded the concessions to the Muslims, moved break times back to normal and assurred other employees that no one had been paid for they time they had walked off the job.

The Grand Island employees should be grateful; more than 100 workers were fired in Greeley, Colo., after they left their shifts to pray at sunset.

Negotiations are continuing in Grand Island.

What's the solution?

We don't know. One shouldn't have to choose between being true to one's faith and making a living. We can understand the feelings of other workers who think they aren't being treated equally.

One thing for sure, with the new makeup of America's diverse labor force, employers, unions and workers themselves are going to have to thrash out a system that's acceptable to all involved.