A recent post on the blog Zeldalily details the firing of Riam Dean, a UK native who was employed at the clothing mega-chain Abercrombie & Fitch. Riam has a prosthetic arm and normally wears a long-sleeve shirt to conceal it. The A&F store dress code normally requires employees to wear short sleeved shirts but Riam was given permission by the store-level management at A&F to wear a sweater.
Fast forward to a few days later. Riam’s store gets a visit from an image assessment team, and is summarily reassigned to stockroom duty, since she does not fit A&F’s “look policy” which, by its very name, sounds like it is a discrimination lawsuit waiting to happen.
Which, in this case, is exactly what happened: Riam is suing A&F for what they did. And I don’t blame her. In fact, this is so far out of bounds, I dare call it Hitleresque discrimination, and A&F deserves to pay dearly for this mistake.
Particularly disturbing is that this is not the first such misstep for A&F. The site afjustice.com documents a class-action lawsuit filed against A&F in 2004, based on flagrant racism in hiring practices, and settled for US$40 million. I’d like to think that lesson wasn’t so quickly forgotten. Apparently, it was, or A&F management forgot to tell the UK/Europe division about it.