Abercrombie & Fitch Bias Case Is
Settled
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE,
NYTimes on the web, November
17, 2004
Abercrombie & Fitch, one of the nation's trendiest
retailers, settled race and sex discrimination lawsuits yesterday, agreeing to
alter its well-known collegiate, all-American -- and
largely white -- image by adding more blacks,
Hispanics and Asians to its marketing materials.
After a federal judge in San Francisco approved the class-action settlement
yesterday, the two sides announced an agreement that calls for Abercrombie &
Fitch to pay $40 million to several thousand minority and female plaintiffs.
Abercrombie also agreed to hire 25 diversity
recruiters and a vice president for diversity and to pursue benchmarks so that
its hiring and promotion of minorities and women reflect its applicant pool.
In an unusual step, the settlement calls for Abercrombie to increase
diversity not just in hiring and promotions, but also in its advertisements and
catalogs, which have long featured models who were overwhelmingly white and who
seemed to have stepped off the football field or out of fraternities or
sororities. Plaintiffs' lawyers said they
insisted that the company agree to add more diversity to its marketing materials
so as not to discourage minorities from applying for jobs.
In another unusual move, the settlement requires Abercrombie to stop focusing
on predominantly white fraternities and sororities in its recruitment.
Many Abercrombie workers have said that company
employees were often told to go to college campuses and to urge good-looking
fraternity and sorority members to apply for jobs.
When Abercrombie was sued in June 2003, several Hispanic, black and Asian
plaintiffs complained that when they applied for jobs, they were steered not to
sales positions out front, but to low-visibility, back-of-the-store jobs,
stocking and cleaning up.
"Abercrombie had a back-of-the-bus mentality," said Kimberly West-Faulcon,
Western regional counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.
"Now instead of hiring them in the back of the store, they will
have diversity recruiters. It sends a message to
young people that we're moving past this kind of thing."
Bill Lann Lee, the plaintiffs' lead lawyer and former director of the Justice
Department's civil rights division, said Abercrombie had refused to hire many
minority students who had impressive work and school records. He
added that the percentages of minority and women managers at Abercrombie were
far below industry averages.
"We're talking about discrimination being visited on some of the best and the
brightest within their community," Mr. Lee said.
He applauded the settlement, approved yesterday by Judge Susan Illston of
Federal District Court. "The import of this
settlement is that a major American company has stepped forward and become a
model," Mr. Lee said.
Abercrombie, which did not admit guilt, agreed to hire a monitor, to provide
diversity training to all managers who do hiring and to revise performance
evaluations for managers, making progress in diversity goals a factor in bonuses
and compensation. The settlement also called for
$7.2 million in lawyers' fees.
In a statement, Mike Jeffries, Abercrombie's chairman, said:
"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."
Several industry analysts said the settlement would help Abercrombie's
marketing. The company has 700 stores and 22,000
employees and had $1.7 billion in sales last year.
"Their profile, their image is going to evolve," said Robin S. Murchison, a
retail analyst with Jefferies & Company. "It
will still be the cool kids. You can walk onto
any Ivy League campus and there's a lot more going on than Waspy-looking guys
and girls. I think they'll tap into that.
I actually think it will work to their
advantage."
In an interview yesterday, Carla Grubb, a 21-year-old black plaintiff who is
a student at California State University at Bakersfield, said that after she
applied for a sales job at an Abercrombie store, she was hired to dust, clean
windows and vacuum.
"I was always doing cleaning -- they said I was a
good window washer," said Ms. Grubb, who later landed a job elsewhere repairing
computers. "I should have received the same
treatment as everybody else. It made me feel
bad. No one should be judged by the color of
their skin."
Eduardo Gonzalez, the lead plaintiff and a senior chemistry major at Stanford
University, said that when he applied to an Abercrombie store in Santa Clara,
Calif., managers urged him to apply for the overnight stocking crew.
Noting that his application was rejected, he said that when a store
manager interviewed him and 13 other applicants at once, the manager
overwhelmingly favored the two white applicants.
"I love this settlement," Mr. Gonzalez said. "It's
a landmark thing for an American icon. They were
portraying this image that all-American is all white. That's
not the case."
Thomas Lennox, Abercrombie's director of communications, said that with the
settlement, "we're bringing this issue to closure as well as implementing
policies and practices that will ensure greater diversity throughout our
organization."
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