Posted on 11/16/2004 6:46:54 PM PST by wagglebee
LOS ANGELES - Abercrombie & Fitch Co. has agreed to pay $40 million to black, Hispanic and Asian employees and job applicants to settle a class-action federal discrimination lawsuit that accused the clothing retailer of promoting whites at the expense of minorities, lawyers said Tuesday.
The settlement, approved Tuesday morning by U.S. District Court Judge Susan Illston, requires the company to adhere to a consent decree that calls for the implementation of new policies and programs to promote diversity and prevent discrimination in its workforce. Abercrombie & Fitch also must pay about $10 million to monitor compliance and cover attorneys' fees, although the agreement contains no admission of wrongdoing by the company.
"We have, and always have had, no tolerance for discrimination. We decided to settle this suit because we felt that a long, drawn out dispute would have been harmful to the company and distracting to management," chairman and CEO Mike Jeffries said in a statement Tuesday.
In trading, Abercrombie & Fitch shares closed down 93 cents, or 2.1 percent, at $44.08 on the New York Stock Exchange. Wall Street had known the settlement was coming; last week, in its third-quarter earnings report, Abercrombie & Fitch had said it would pay $50 million to resolve the litigation.
The lawsuit originally was filed last June in San Francisco by Hispanic and Asian groups charging that Abercrombie & Fitch, known for its "classic casual American" clothing styles, hires a disproportionately white sales force, puts minorities in less-visible jobs and cultivates a virtually all-white image in its catalogues and elsewhere. A second, similar lawsuit was filed against the company last November in New Jersey.
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission joined the private plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which alleged that Abercrombie & Fitch violated portions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The lawsuit specifically accused the company of engaging in recruiting and hiring practices that exclude minorities and adopting a virtually all-white marketing campaign.
"The retail industry and other industries need to know that businesses cannot discriminate against individuals under the auspice of a marketing strategy or a particular 'look'. Race and sex discrimination in employment are unlawful, and the EEOC will continue to aggressively pursue employers who choose to engage in such practices," said Eric Dreiband, the EEOC's general counsel.
The EEOC estimated the lawsuit would affect more than 10,000 Hispanic, Asian or black men and women.
The consent decree calls for Abercrombie & Fitch to hire a vice president of diversity and hire up to 25 diversity recruiters. The company also promised that its marketing materials would reflect diversity.
The original lawsuit was brought on behalf of nine young minorities, including students and graduates of Stanford University and the University of California, who were denied jobs or fired based on their race.
"This agreement promises to transform this company, whose distinctiveness will no longer stem from an all-white image and workforce," said Thomas A. Saenz, vice president of litigation at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
Guess next the race pimps will go after Jet magazine for being to dang black....
Or 'Wetbacks of the Rio Grande's swimsuit edition
I read it this morning and the thought immediately came to mind: socialism by other means! Why bother nationalizing industries, having to dirty our delicate blue state hands trying to run them and potentially fail like our brothers in arms did in Eastern Europe and Russia for 70 odd years, when we can run them (the industries) by proxy, using the world's best judicial system to extract profits from the evil capitalists to fund our world domination causes?!
As we say in colloquial English TORO KAKA.
I'm torn between hating junk "discrimination" lawsuits, and being thrilled to see this company taken down. Any chance they'll go out of business?
My cousins, who are white, wear FUBU.
And?
I'm torn between hating junk "discrimination" lawsuits, and being thrilled to see this company taken down. Any chance they'll go out of business?
I feel your ambivalence, my friend. I confess to having seen some of their catalogs of recent years. Correct me if I'm wrong, but somewhere in the nineties they changed corporate hands and went from the staid catalog outfitter where President TR got his hunting duds to a casual clothes retailer aimed at the youth market with jaw-droppingly crotch-grabbing omnisexual catalog photo essays.
Morality aside, it is true that both the kiddies on the pages and the kiddies in the stores (Washington, DC, in my case) are of a hue that would make Heinrich Himmler stand up and salute. That is undeniable. Abercrombie & B**ch has already been flogged up one side and down the other on this site and if I were twenty years younger I would go undercover and expose them. Such is not possible, but I am ready to believe that the plantiffs in this case do in fact have a leg to stand on.
Does FUBU have discriminatory hiring practises? If yes, then they shoudl be sued. The question is not of marketing practises but hiring one particular group to the exclusion of others. If a black company does that, it is as liable as A&F
Interesting ... we've made a point of avoiding their stores and their catalogs, so I only know what I see on FR :-). Even if they are discriminatory ... the plaintiffs should have more self respect than to sue over not being hired by child pornographers!
I refer you to this excerpt from the article and invite you to visit the FUBU website. Can send me to a portion of the site which might represent a "diversity" in the marketing campaign?
Bear in mind, I really don't have a problem with companies which develop products aimed at a single specific slice of the population. The smart move is then to advertise to those who comprise the target market, regardless of ethnicity.
Extortion, pure and simple.
Extortion.
Let's see, after attorney fees and court costs, 93 cents is about all each of those rejected applicants will get!
I don't know if it a power grab or just a big scary fishing net - but I don't like it when government wants to determine how a company goes about marketing its products.
I don't know about their hiring practices but a lot of the other urban clothing lines have pretty diverse staff. I do know that their ad campaign is way more diverse than Abercrombie. However, I've been in Abercrombie before and the clothing quality is CRAP. They're marketing a whole Girls Gone Wild type image based on overpriced sweat shop material. One tank top I wanted was fifty dollars. FIFTY. I still have have a FUBU sweatshirt over ten years old *LOL*
It may or may not be. I've been the target of workplace discrimination before, except I didn't sue anyone. I talked it over and now I've still employed getting paid more than a lot of other people. Also, my ex-boyfriend had the same problem sort of, being discriminated against for being older and also being white and he won. Most discrimination lawsuits get thrown out of court. The ones that win, usually win because of excellent documentation.
As long as there's MTV and college, probably not!
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