<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML> The paragraphs below are from a story (<A HREF="http://wire.ap.org/?FRONTID=HOME&SITE=COBOU">http://wire.ap.org/?FRONTID=HOME&SITE=COBOU</A>) that AP published about a week ago, focusing on a suit filed by eight Spanish-speaking workers and the EEOC against Watlow Batavia, a metal-casting and assembly plant in Illinois. <<It's not that English-only policies are illegal. Companies can have them as long as they can prove they are a ``business necessity''  — say, in an air-traffic control tower.  <<Trouble is, say (EEOC attorney José) Behar and others, some companies are taking it  too far — and instituting policies often because they simply want to know what their employees are talking about.  <<``When there's some type of health and safety at stake, those  are situations where English only should be required. But in the  vast majority of jobs, there really is no justification,'' says Donya  Fernandez, an attorney with the Language Rights Project, a San  Francisco-based organization that serves as a resource for  workers who either can't or sometimes prefer not to speak  English.  <<This summer, the organization helped work out an agreement at  an Emeryville, Calif., casino where kitchen cooks were told they  had to speak English, even though they all spoke Cantonese.>></HTML>