Story on discrimination claims for hiring retail employees for good-looking appearance, inspired by Abercrombie case
July 24, 2003New York Times Story by Steven Greenhouse quotes Donna Harper, supervisory attorney in the EEOC’s St. Louis office, among others, in discussing possible race, gender, national origin, age, and disability claims that may arise when companies use “branding” and their perceptions of customer preferences in selection of employees.
Check this site for summary by plaintiff’s law firm of claims against Abercrombie.
It has long been a basic principle of discrimination law that customer preferences are no defense. It could hardly have been otherwise, given that discrimination laws arose in response to blatant racial discrimination in places where companies could accurately predict their customers would not want minority employees serving them (at least in certain capacities). If customer preference would have been a defense when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, it would have shielded vast amounts of racial discrimination.
Related Posts
How class actions encourage greed
HR Record Retention Requirements: Or, How Long Do We Have to Keep Those #$#%# Records ?
Abercrombie "image" discrimination case settles for big bucks; another class action victory for plaintiff’s attorneys
Abercrombie’s case settled; Secret Service class claims are dismissed
Interesting blog comments on Abercrombie & Fitch "appearance discrimination"
No Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Leave a comment
If you want to leave a feedback to this post or to some other user´s comment, simply fill out the form below.