Clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch will permanently drop its ban on headscarves under a settlement announced Monday and will pay a total of $71,000 to two Bay Area Muslim women who lost job opportunities because of their attire.
The agreement comes three weeks after a federal judge ruled that Abercrombie & Fitch violated the religious rights of one of the women, Hani Khan, by firing her after she refused to remove the hijab she wore while working as a stockroom clerk at the retailer’s Hollister Co. outlet in San Mateo.
“I am hopeful that my struggle and this victory will ensure that what happened to me at Abercrombie never happens to any other employees there,” sad Khan, who will receive $48,000 in the settlement. “All Americans have the right to religious accommodation in the workplace.”
The company will pay $23,000 to Halla Banafa, who said she was denied a job at its Milpitas store because she wore a headscarf to her employment interview. Another federal judge had refused to dismiss a suit that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed on her behalf.
‘Look’ policy
Abercrombie has maintained a mandatory dress and grooming code, called the “Look” policy, that requires employees to wear clothes similar to those sold at its stores. The policy previously included a ban on all headwear, but the company changed it - after the Khan suit was filed - to allow Muslim women to wear headscarves in some cases.
The settlement requires Abercrombie to accommodate the religious beliefs and practices, unless the company can show it would suffer undue hardships. In future cases, if an employee is denied a religious exemption from the “Look” policy, she will be allowed to keep her job while appealing to the human resources director. The settlement also provides for three years of monitoring by the EEOC.
Abercrombie issued a statement saying it does not discriminate based on religion and grants reasonable religious accommodations when requested. “We are happy to have settled these cases and to have put these very old matters behind us,” the company said.
Bias complaints
The hijab policy is an example of an increasing number of complaints that civil rights lawyers and agencies are receiving about bias against Muslims, said attorney Marsha Chien of the San Francisco Legal Aid Society‘s Employment Law Center, which represented Khan.
“Discrimination of this kind continues at an alarming rate throughout the country,” Chien said.
Khan, now 23, wore a hijab to her job interview in October 2009 at the store in the Hillsdale Mall in San Mateo. She was hired and was allowed to keep wearing the headscarf - as long as it matched company colors - until a district manager spotted her at the store four months later, according to the judge who ruled in her favor.
The manager contacted the local human resources director, and Khan was immediately suspended with pay, then fired 11 days later.
In her Sept. 3 ruling, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of Oakland said Abercrombie had granted exemptions since 2005 that allowed employees to wear a Jewish yarmulke, a baseball cap, a jeweled cross, and, in at least 16 other cases, a hijab. She said the company had produced no evidence that Khan’s attire had led to “complaints, disruption, or a noticeable effect on sales.”