Discrimination is a dirty word these days but we certainly haven’t seen the death of it – a quartet of cases have made the legal news this week…

22-year-old law student, Riam Dean told an employment tribunal she felt "diminished" and "humiliated" after being made to work in a stockroom at Abercrombie & Fitch in Saville Row. A student being made to work in a stockroom doesn’t sound that bad in itself but… Ms Dean who was born with her left forearm missing and wears a prosthetic arm started out on the shop floor. She said she was granted special permission to wear a cardigan to cover the join in her arm but she told the tribunal she was later removed from the shop floor and made to work in the stockroom because basically the cardigan wasn’t trendy enough for the dress code. She is suing for disability discrimination and seeking up to £20,000 in damages. Source

Across the Channel, executives from French cosmetics giant, L’Oréal, apparently sought an all-white team of sales staff to promote its shampoos. Erreur fondamentale! La Cour de Cassation, the highest court in France, found the company guilty of racial discrimination after it was told that Garnier, L’Oréal’s beauty products division, tried to keep black, Asian and Arab women from selling its Fructis shampoo in French supermarkets. Adecco, the temporary recruitment agency whose Districom division hired the hostesses, was also found guilty of racial discrimination. Source

Meanwhile, Blackstone Chambers’ Dinah Rose QC has won an appeal against a Jewish school that refused entry to a boy on the grounds that his mother was not recognised as Jewish by the Office of the Chief Rabbi. The Court of Appeal’s Ruling stated  “The requirement that if a pupil is to qualify for admission his mother must be Jewish, whether by descent or by conversion, is a test of ethnicity which contravenes the Race Relations Act 1976. If the discrimination is direct, as we consider it is, it cannot be justified.” Source

Finally, more than 12,000 men in low-paid jobs such as care assistants, caretakers, drivers and leisure attendants won the right to bring equal pay claims alongside thousands of women this week. The claims related to bonuses paid to male workers in better paid jobs, such as gardeners and refuse collectors. In a test case, 300 men lodged discrimination claims against South Tyneside Metropolitan Borough Council and Hartlepool and Middlesbrough Borough Councils. The men lodged their claims at the same time as those by women in low-paid jobs who were also claiming that the bonuses were discriminatory. The women had succeeded in their claims and were offered financial settlements but the men had not and continued to be paid less both than the better paid men, and also the women. Just think; that probably made sense to someone at the time… Source