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Employment Law Tip of the Day: Want to create a company policy that will ensure all your personnel decisions are fraught with racism, sexism, ablism, ageism, gender normativity, and size discrimination? Try rating your employee’s looks on a scale of zero to five, and put the ones who don’t conform to an “all-American, clean, wholesome, or the girl or boy next door” look in the back room folding clothes where they are unable to disgust customers and dilute your brand image with their nonconforming presentations.
Just like Abercrombie & Fitch did!
Make sure that you claim, loudly and often, that you are working on diversity, by providing managers with a “look book” of appropriate faces that include Black, white, and Latino/as. You know, all the races! When somebody points out that you have no Asian faces in your look book or in your marketing campaigns, just point out that for some reason, Asians just don’t like A&F so hiring and marketing to that demographic just doesn’t make good business sense.
My therapist suggested that I channel some of my body image woes into good, old-fashioned anger (I’m not entirely sure how beneficial being angrier could possibly be, unless rage induced brain embolisms are good for you now, but I like her so I’m willing to try it) so here you go, from the Chicago Sun Times:
I’ll sum it up: Joseph Annunzio, nephew of the late Machine politician Rep. Frank Annunzio, had a sweet patronage position at the Chicago Department of Transportation. So sweet he felt like he could call African American coworkers “Mambo Gorilla” and “allegedly [put] a tablecloth on his head and [act] like a Klansman in the co-worker’s office.” He got fired and had a hearing before the Human Resources Board who gave him back his $77,000-a-year job because, despite the testimony of eleven coworkers that he was a racist asshole, none of them testified that Annunzio’s racial slurs were directed at them personally. And so “[t]he board did not think that kind of misconduct should cause someone to forfeit their career.
Big Joe can go to each coworker and spout a rich variety of racist statements, but as long as he’s always talking about somebody else, it’s okay, because we wouldn’t want to actually punish somebody for his racism. That would be unfair. And politically damaging to the members of the HR Board who handed down that decision.
I just wonder who on the HR Board owed whom a favor.
Somebody call Anthony Boswell. Oh no wait, he’s Mayor Daley’s political appointee to head the Office of Compliance, an office created by Mayor Daley charged with “enforcing terms of a federal consent decree banning political considerations in hiring and promotions of most city employees.” (Emphasis mine, and if you don’t see the hilarity in Richard M. creating and staffing an office designed to ensure compliance with an anti-patronage decree, then you must not live in Chicago.)
Once you’re hired, you can do whatever you want. As long as you’ve got clout.
Hm. Somehow I don’t feel any better.