To think rejecting someone for job on the basis of their “strong Welsh accent” is disgusting and discriminatory?

[CounsellorTroi]

I hope she gets bsomewhere with a discrimination case.

nation.cymru/news/cardiff-woman-who-posted-rejection-letter-blaming-her-strong-welsh-accent-offered-legal-help/

@MasterBeth

A person with a “strong foreign European accent” is not “a poor communicator.”

Have you not read any of the posts about university lecturers from other countries that have such strong accents? That students stopped attending their lectures because of the inability to understand them.

Therefore, whatever your accent, if you fail to communicate clearly with your audience so that they understand you, the fault lies with you not your audience.

Those posts about lecturers were disgusting. I hope that none of that happened.

That certainly sounds like the grudge you have been holding for decades about this person with the “strong foreign European accent” that dented your hopes and dreams.

Maybe reconsider now you are an adult that the foreign speaker going to the trouble of speaking to you in your own language is doing more than their fair share of the work and that your communication (it’s not a one-way process) might be aided by you. Seriously, instead of blaming this teacher, twenty or thirty years on, really reconsider how intently you tried to understand.

@MasterBeth

A person with a “strong foreign European accent” is not “a poor communicator.”

Exactly.

Nonsense to suggest otherwise.

If he had a “strong London/Liverpool/Bristol accent”, would you describe him as a “poor communicator”, @OldieWordly?

Worth noting: all U.K. accents are also European accents.

I did check all my potential module leaders intro videos before picking my modules due to, amongst other things, being burned by strong accents, which is a struggle when they are mentioning legal cases you need to be able to search for (Ie not spoon fed on a handout or slides)

Eluned Anderson is regional ambassador for the Holocaust Education Trust - this is the "regional activity" mentioned in the rejection email. She has also strongly criticised the antisemitism of some factions in Labour. I suspect the problem they had with her was that rather than her accent.

Someone will think you have a strong accent @burnoutbabe.

Here she is. I wouldn't have employed her after this. If this did happen, the company were monumentally stupid to have made that particular excuse.
morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/young-labour-chair-candidate-withdraws-over-comments-about-incredibly-good-looking

This thread is hitting close to home, as someone who loves someone with a speech impediment. I would hate for that person to be rejected from jobs because they sometimes need to remember to speak more slowly/clearly. They CAN be easily understood, if the person they are speaking to is just a little bit patient.

[quote Maggit]Here she is. I wouldn't have employed her after this. If this did happen, the company were monumentally stupid to have made that particular excuse.
morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/young-labour-chair-candidate-withdraws-over-comments-about-incredibly-good-looking[/quote]
That's not great

I'm American, I understood her. I agree with PPs who are skeptical that an employer actually put that in a rejection letter, though.

Probably worth noting that she appears to have received a lot of support from within the Jewish community over the backlash against that comment.

www.thejc.com/news/uk/anger-over-twitter-over-policing-after-shoah-education-volunteer-attacked-for-eichmann-comment-1.507714

I don’t think struggling with an accent automatically makes someone xenophobic. If they negatively judged the person because of their accent then that’s different, but just as some people can’t mimic other accents and some are brilliant at it, so some people may have more of a ‘tin ear’ for certain accents than others and find it harder to make out words, especially if the speaker is talking quickly.

She doesn’t even have a strong accent! If someone can’t understand her then they need to work on their listening and comprehension skills.

A particular accent may require you personally to listen more intently but there is no such thing as an intrinsically "difficult" accent

Of course there is

How the frig do you think people in Glasgow communicate with each other

I don’t know where to begin with this. They are attuned to their own accents so of course they understand each other.

Yes, it’s terrible how some people’s lives can be affected by the prejudices they had as children
A person with a “strong foreign European accent” is not “a poor communicator.”

It’s not prejudice. When you are having a one to one conversation with someone with a strong accent you can ask them to repeat themselves. You can’t ask a teacher or university lecturer to repeat themselves all the time. They might be a brilliant communicator and explain things well, but if it is in a difficult to understand accent then students will struggle.

Those posts about lecturers were disgusting. I hope that none of that happened.

Bangs head against a brick wall
If you can’t understand the lecturer it is a massive problem for the students. They can’t stop the lecture and ask the lecturer to repeat themselves. It is harder for STEM subjects when there is a lot of new vocabulary to learn, and makes it difficult to google search when following up a lecture when the word they have written down bears no resemblance to what it should sound like.

Having a difficult to understand accent doesn't seem to stop companies outsourcing their call centres to off shore teams

A lot of them have been brought back to the UK now because they received too many complaints @Justkeeppedaling. I can’t remember the last time I spoke to someone with an Indian accent at a call centre.

@Morfil

The amount of people voting ‘YABU’ is shocking (and each one of them a racist- or xenophobe if you prefer).

Shocking and disgusting yes, but not surprising.

A lot of people on MN are very openly biased against regional accents and many openly hold negative views about perceived education and intelligence/work ethic based on where someone is from and their accent.

I hope none of those people are in recruitment.

DH nearly missed a flight from Mumbai because, although all the announcements were made in English, he could not make out what they were saying.
BTW he has spent a lot of time in India working so it wasn't as if he wasn't used to Indian accents.

The fact that they saw nothing wrong with openly citing that as a reason is very surprising, although I'm sure that sadly many people are informaly disadvantaged (ie other reasons are given) for their accents and yes its unacceptable. I do get that some accents in honesty can be harder to understand than others if you're not familiar with them, but I'd question accessibility and communication policies in an organisation where it would be a deal breaker.

She doesn’t sound Welsh at all. That’s insane

There is scepticism about whether the rejection is real for a number of reasons, not least the fact it appears to have been written in the Notes app on an Apple phone. And the fact that no company would put this stuff in writing.

If it’s real, though, then she has a straightforward case for discrimination, and I hope that ACAS was her first port of call for advice. Not Twitter.

I'm the person who told an Irish person that she had a very unusual name after she had introduced herself and I tried, unsuccessfully, to repeat what she had said. A friend took me aside and explained that she had said her name was "Jane". Didn't sound like that to me, I thought it sounded like "join"!

If you have a strong regional accent, and you are away from that region and pretty much the only person with that accent it can be hard for people on first meeting you to understand it. I think there has to be a bit of understanding of this on both sides. Once you're attuned to an accent you're fine and you wonder why you had difficulty in the first place.
As for the video - meh. It's hard to tell if she has a difficult to understand accent when you're in general conversation with someone over a prepared speech to video (she is speaking clearly and quite slowly in that)

I sincerely hope that this turns out to be a hoax

So do I, but if it is there's also the question of what it says about her and her judgement

That employer is going to end up paying out lots of compensation.

These days you can't discriminate on nationality or ethnic grounds. It's not the 1950s any more.

I see on twitter the trade unions are offering to step in and help her.

Her accent isn't particularly strong, i wouldn't immediately think she was welsh from the videos. I would lean toward the employer was more put off by her 'regional activities' if it is genuine. Pretty straight forward discrimination case if it's a real rejection though.

I have an accent, not particularly strong but it's obvious im from Newcastle upon Tyne, when I worked in a call centre I was often asked to slow down or repeat myself because people couldn't understand me but I've never been criticised or rejected from a job because of it (and I'm pretty sure my current manager hired me because she's a fan of Sarah Millican and likes to accent!).

DH nearly missed a flight from Mumbai because, although all the announcements were made in English, he could not make out what they were saying.

🤣🤣🤣

I don't have a problem with them rejecting her on the basis of her accent and (more importantly) her regional activities, but they were idiots to actually put that in writing. Heads should roll, not for the discrimination, but the sheer idiocy of telling the applicant that!