Abercrombie & Fitch

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Next, this issue is related to the ‘look policy’ in the company. According to Tomasszewskl & Whitehouse (2016), a transgender employee sued Abercrombie & Fitch for sex discrimination. He claimed that he was humiliated and dismissed for his refusal to wear women’s clothing in the store. Maha Shalaby, who was born female but later identifies as a male, was forced to wear ‘girl’s uniform’ while working at the store (Tomasszewskl & Whitehouse 2016). When he got recruited, he was told he was permitted to wear men’s clothing to work but later told by his store manager that he is not allowed to do so due to the ‘look policy’. His store manager told him he could only wear ‘girls uniform’ because that’s what customers want to see. He gets the pressure …show more content…

Furthermore, an African-American male model failed to get the job because his looks was not ‘exotic’ enough (Dearden 2015). The discrimination on people based on their skin colour is the one of the major issues in Abercrombie and Fitch. The African-American male models receive unfair treatment because of their skin colour. The culture of racism will happen in the company is due to the influence of their former CEO, Mike Jefferies. In an interview, Mike Jeffries once stated that he only hires good-looking people in his stores because good-looking people will attract other good-looking people (Kaplan 2015). Therefore, he created the unequal ‘look policy’ for his employees, to categorize his employees based on their physical attractiveness. Most of the brand representatives of Abercrombie & Fitch are mostly white men and he does not like to hire employees that do not belong to the good-looking categories such as African-American. He has the mind-set that white male model looks cooler than the African-American male model. The store managers are afraid to hire African-American model in the stores and will ask them to leave earlier so that they would not be seen during the stores visit from Mike Jeffries. The company CEO should not create a racist working environment. When they do not comply with the EEO and AA will result into fines by the government which causes the company to suffer unnecessary losses (Bedi, Lakra & Gupta 2014, p. 104). A CEO as a company leader should not state a discriminative statement to their employees, this will cause the employees to adopt to the culture and affect the harmonious diversity environment. The top management team and HR managers should focus on perception of

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