"You Can't Speak English"

“She said ‘You can’t speak English properly, you’re incompetent, you shouldn’t be working here’ – things like that. I’m just trying to tell her that we don’t have the shoes.”

 

Lenka Smith is a manager at Whistles Edinburgh, a mid-to-high-end store tucked into the row of mid-to-high-end stores on George Street, Edinburgh. But her success in Scotland, especially as a migrant woman, has not come without its hardships.

 

Born and raised in Slovakia in the 1980s, Lenka had no intention of moving to Scotland. “After getting my degree, I moved to LA and lived there for a few years, but I came here on a holiday,” she recalls her first experience of Scotland “I knew I had to be here”. Lenka decided to move to Scotland and worked various jobs for a while before securing a job at the historic Jenners store. 

 

It was then that she began to see certain hurdles in her way due to prejudice against migrants. “I saw my co-workers getting quicker promotions and more customers, customers were nicer to them than they were to me, perhaps because of my accent. It was very… disheartening. I worked harder than all of them and I was getting nowhere.” After years of working at Jenners and multiple interviews where she was considered but not selected for a promotion, Lenka managed to become a supervisor at Joules, which she juggled with being a carer for her husband, a wheelchair user, while pregnant with her first child. “I had to do what I had to do. I worked hard for my life; I couldn’t just let it go.” A year after the birth of her first son, Lenka was finally given the title of manager at Hobbs, a role she remained loyal to for 4 years, before the store shut for relocation and she was offered the manager position at Whistles in August of 2023. Since Lenka joined Whistles as manager, the Edinburgh branch has gone from being one of the least profitable to one of the most profitable branches.

 

Looking back on her career., she remarks “It shouldn’t have taken me this long to get here. The current manager at Hobbs is in her late twenties, the last manager at Whistles was in her late twenties.” She went on to explain that she believed that her identity as a migrant with a noticeable accent has played a part in this. “It shouldn’t. I’m good at my job. I know it. That should be the only thing that matters.” Additionally, Lenka feels as though both employers and the public are quite ignorant and have presumptions about Eastern European people. “I’ve seen that people here talk a lot about Polish people being like this and being like that, [and] because they can’t tell, they don’t know that I’m not Polish. They make decisions about my employment based on their wrong and untrue stereotypes.”

 

Lenka then recalls a recent encounter with a customer over the phone wherein she picked up the phone and the customer asked for an item that was not in store. After looking for the item, finding out that it is unavailable, and relaying this information back to them, she was met with “the most disgusting language”, calling her multiple expletives, as well as telling her that she was unfit for the role of manager and that she should quit because she is incompetent. “What can I say to them? The customer comes first.” She continued, explaining that customer service is an important part of her job, and that she does enjoy creating a rapport with customers, but that some customers “think they can say anything to me because it’s over the phone or because I work in retail instead of an office job.” She has also that customers have often asked for the manager after hearing her accent and assuming that she is unable to lead the store. “It’s just unfair because people are being handed the promotions that I’ve had to neglect my children for.”