California Apparel News

The federal discrimination lawsuit recently filed against Abercrombie & Fitch Co., a nationwide purveyor of casual apparel targeting young people, started when a student at the University of California, Los Angeles, began seeing his hours cut back at the company’s Santa Monica, Calif., store.

Juancarlos Gomez-Montejano started working at the Third Street Promenade store on Nov. 22, 1998, while a student at UCLA.

Gomez-Montejano, now 24 years old, normally worked about 20 hours a week. But he said the store gradually reduced his hours until he was not listed on the schedule. In July 1999, he requested his personnel file and learned he had been fired from his position without being advised, the lawsuit said.

“I thought everything was normal,” he said. “Later when I started coming in to check the work schedule, there were zero hours on my schedule. I was never fired. They were telling me, ’Schedule conflict.’hellip; I was going from 20 hours to 15 to 10 to four to nothing at all within a three- or four-week period.”

Feeling he was being edged out because of his race, the UCLA student went to the Los Angeles office of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund for an attorney referral. Instead, MALDEF attorneys took up his case.

After investigating and finding other plaintiffs who alleged racial discrimination by Abercrombie & Fitch, MALDEF filed a civil-rights lawsuit on behalf of nine plaintiffs on June 16 in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

Abercrombie & Fitch spokesman Thomas Lennox said in a statement that the allegations against Abercrombie are baseless. The company plans to defend its good name in court. He added that Abercrombie & Fitch does not discriminate and that the company’s policy is to have zero tolerance for discrimination in hiring or employment on the basis of race, national origin or ancestry.

Joining MALDEF in the lawsuit were the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., and the San Francisco law firm of Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein LLP.

Most of the nine young Latino and Asian plaintiffs worked in Abercrombie stores in Southern California. The lawsuit alleged that the New Albany, Ohio–based, retailer discriminates against African-Americans, Latinos and Asians.

“Through means both subtle and direct, Abercrombie has consistently reinforced to its store manager that they must recruit and maintain an overwhelmingly white workforce,” said Thomas A. Saenz, vice president of litigation for MALDEF. “The company has systematically cultivated an all-white ’A&F Look.’”

That was reinforced by other plaintiffs in the case, such as Jennifer Lu, a 21-year-old student at the University of California, Irvine, who worked for three years at the Abercrombie store in Costa Mesa, Calif.

“I went in on a typical day to get my schedule, and upon arrival I learned I had been terminated,” she said in a voice that cracked with emotion. “I had learned that I and other Asian peers were terminated because of a corporate inspection by corporate officers into our store earlier. They came in pointing to Abercrombie posters and saying, ’We need to have more staff that looks like this,’ which was a white, Caucasian male. I begged for my job back hellip; But all I got was a cold shoulder.”

Four other Asian employees who worked in the Costa Mesa store were terminated. Three of those—Austin Chu, Ivy Nguyen and Angeline Wu—have joined Lu in the lawsuit.

Lu said Abercrombie managers told her the store was not doing well. But a few weeks later, at least five new Caucasian employees were employed, the lawsuit alleged.

Other plaintiffs in the lawsuit are Eduardo Gonzalez, a 19-year-old Stanford University student, who said he was denied employment at the Abercrombie store in Santa Clara, Calif.; Anthony Ocampo, a 21-year-old Stanford student who said the Abercrombie store at the Glendale Galleria in Glendale, Calif., turned down his application for a summer position and told him it had already employed too many Filipino-Americans; Encarnacion Gutierrez, a UCLA student who said the Santa Monica store rejected his application because he is not white; and Johan Montoya, a University of California, Santa Barbara, student who said he was denied employment at the Canoga Park, Calif., store because of his race.

The lawsuit does not yet request specific damages. Attorneys are seeking more plaintiffs to participate in the case through a Web site devoted to the case, www.afjustice.com.

“The lawsuit filed aims to ensure that in the future no one else will have to experience this kind of anger and emotion at this particular company,” Saenz said.

This is not the first time Abercrombie & Fitch has been accused of racial insensitivity.

Last spring, after complaints by Asian- American groups, the company removed Tshirts that showed caricatures of two Asianlooking men from its store shelves. The Tshirt’s slogan was: “Wong Brothers Laundry Service—Two Wongs Can Make it White.” —Deborah Belgum