World Concern’s Human­i­tar­ian Aid out­reach in Viet­name includes employ­ing peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties. This young man works in a pho­to­copy shop and han­dles cus­tomers with ease, yet he couldn’t eas­ily find work else­where because of a slight deformation.

I always want to give some­body, or even a com­pany, the ben­e­fit of the doubt. But it seems that there may be a pretty big prob­lem here.

If you haven’t seen it, some­one else has decided to sue trendy cloth­ing retailer Aber­crom­bie & Fitch for dis­abil­ity dis­crim­i­na­tion. A beau­ti­ful young woman in Lon­don named Riam Dean claims that she was forced to work in the stock­room in the back of the store because she has a pros­thetic arm. Dean was born with­out her left fore­arm and says she has not expe­ri­enced this kind of dis­crim­i­na­tion before.

From a Guardian arti­cle about the case:

Dean claims that when she told A&F about her dis­abil­ity after get­ting the job, the firm agreed she could wear a white cardi­gan to cover the link between her pros­the­sis and her upper arm. But shortly after­wards, she was told she could not work on the shop floor unless she took off the cardi­gan as she was break­ing the firm’s “look pol­icy”. She told the tri­bunal that some­one in the A&F head office sug­gested she stay in the stock­room “until the win­ter uni­form arrives”.

The “look pol­icy” stip­u­lates that all employ­ees “rep­re­sent Aber­crom­bie & Fitch with nat­ural, clas­sic Amer­i­can style con­sis­tent with the company’s brand” and “look great while exhibit­ing indi­vid­u­al­ity”. Work­ers must wear a “clean, nat­ural, clas­sic hair­style” and have nails which extend “no more than a quar­ter inch beyond the tip of the finger”.

Dean said today in her evi­dence: “A female A&F man­ager used the ‘look pol­icy’ and the wear­ing of the cardi­gan as an excuse to hide me away in the stockroom.

If this is all true, I could kind of under­stand if there was a heart­less man­ager who didn’t care about the civil rights and emo­tions of an oth­er­wise capa­ble young woman.

What sur­prised me the most was this, from a Wall Street Jour­nal arti­cle:

The New Albany, Ohio, com­pany has faced crit­i­cism in the past from some who claim it delib­er­ately selects young, good-looking peo­ple to work in its stores. In 2004 it spent $50 mil­lion to set­tle a num­ber of employ­ment dis­crim­i­na­tion suits in the U.S.

Really? $50 mil­lion dol­lars? That’s a lot of cash to pay out and not reform your com­pany poli­cies. More than that, it shows a wide­spread pattern.

When I was in Viet­nam a cou­ple of months ago to doc­u­ment World Concern’s Human­i­tar­ian Aid activ­i­ties, I met dozens of peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties. They showed that they have more abil­i­ties, than dis­abil­i­ties, as our Viet­nam coun­try direc­tor says. These peo­ple included seam­stresses, small busi­ness employ­ees and entrepreneurs.

World Con­cern tack­les humani­tiar­ian aid in a sus­tain­able way. We teach peo­ple how to work and max­i­mize their abil­i­ties. We offer microloans at a lower rate than they could get else­where. We out­line a path to suc­cess, and if some­one has the ini­tia­tive, they can prob­a­bly achieve their dreams.

The best part about the out­reach to the “dis­abled?” Their con­fi­dence. If you can offer some­one the abil­ity to see that they have value, that they were cre­ated in the image of God, it’s the best pos­si­ble outcome.

The can do far more.

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