Abercrombie and Fitch Teen Clothing stores, purveyors of rugged shorts, six-packs and skin, have gotten themselves into another legal and ethical morass. In a London Abercrombie outlet,
Unprofessional appearance? Nope. Rian Dean has a prosthetic arm, which management claims violated Abercrombie’s ‘look policy’. Given Abercrombie and Fitch’s clothing line, which sports little clothing and lots of skin, I find Rian’s demotion bizarre. Show your piercings, tattoos and silicone body and any bodily enhancements, God-given or plastic, but don’t show your prosthetic arm.
And here’s the funniest part. Dean has been doing her job as showroom salesperson satisfactorily with her offending prosthetic arm and no one noticed. Suddenly someone realized, ‘hey that’s a fake arm’ and hustled Dean into the back room so no customer would see it? If Dean’s arm was so offensive why did it take so long for someone to notice? Dean was obviously doing her job
properly with her prosthetic arm. The issue was purely a ‘look policy’. Some minnow munching supervisor was clearly short on brain and long on…audacity.
But even I am getting away from the real problem. Can you say Discrimination in all caps and bold? Dean’s demotion in the United States would be a blatant violation of the ADA- the Americans with Disabilities Act, which protects workers from being discriminated against in the workplace owing to physical handicaps. I don’t know what Great Britain may have in place to deal with such atrocities, but I suspect there are similar Parliamentary Acts.
I hope that without too much ado for Rian Dean she gets a barrister who can kick Abercrombie and Fitch right in their dungareed behinds. ‘Looks policy’ indeed.
bercrombie knows nothing about our island community and doesn’t seem to care what it would do to our economy.
The measure would add $10 billion to the cost of the buildup here, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The artificial wage increases would hurt local employers, even those not associated with the buildup, because overall wages would be inflated. Small businesses, which play a vital role in every community’s economy, would be hit particularly hard.
The mandated, artificially high wages also would result in a increase to the cost of living for all Guam residents — rent would go up, as would prices for food, utilities, gas and other basic essentials.
The military buildup is expected to boost the local economy, which has been suffering for years. Abercrombie’s amendment would squelch many of the benefits the buildup is supposed to provide our island.
Guam, because of its remote location and status within the U.S. government, has a long history of people from the outside taking action and making decisions that adversely affect our island. We would expect someone from Hawaii, which has faced the same treatment in its history, to know better.
The Guam Chamber of Commerce and the Guam Contractors Association oppose the measure and plan to lobby against it. We need our elected officials — senators, the governor and our delegate to Congress — to do the same. They need to let federal officials know what the Abercrombie amendment would mean to Guam and press for lawmakers in Congress to remove the provision from the defense spending bill.
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