Large Abercrombie & Fitch Employees Forced to Wear Men’s Clothing

Slutty prep outfitter Abercrombie & Fitch has been criticized recently for not offering women’s XL or XXL sizes, a function of its mission to only “go after the cool kids.” As CEO Mike Jeffries told Salon in 2006, “That’s why we hire good-looking people in our stores. Because good-looking people attract other good-looking people, and we want to market to cool, good-looking people. We don’t market to anyone other than that.” Anyone who’s ever shopped in Soho knows that this isn't limited to A&F; many retailers only hire salespeople attractive enough to serve as models for the brand. At A&F, the discrimination goes all the way to the top.

Kjerstin Gruys, a sociologist who recently wrote a memoir about giving up mirrors for a year, first became interested in the politics of clothing size while working for A&F at the corporate level, as a merchant in the outerwear division. Also writing in Salon, Gruys recalls that, even at the company headquarters, grown-ass women were expected to dress “on brand,” in the latest season of tiny clothing made for teenagers.

The Department of Labor doesn’t even have a term for this middle-school-level workplace hostility.

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Tech Startup Asks Employees to Keep Diet and Exercise Log

for PSFK 2013-04-21 01:27:34 UTC

Citizen, a mobile tech company in Portland, Ore., has taken its health and wellness programs in an interesting direction. The company encourages its employees to submit health and fitness data such as what they eat, how much they exercise and how many hours of sleep they get.

The employees upload their results to a central server as part of a wellness program to determine whether healthy employees are indeed happier or more productive.

The system, called C3PO (Citizen Evolutionary Process Organism), takes a cue from the quantified self movement, which is basically self-tracking your well-being with statistics.

Employees gather information from personal self-tracking tools, like RunKeeper and Fitbit and several software tools within the company — its project-management tool and time-tracking application, for instance — to determine how the employees are doing. The main goal of the program is to help employees become more productive by developing better personal habits.

The program at Citizen is fairly new and is completely voluntary. Only about 10% of its employees have signed up for the program, and the company can only access information to which the employee gives access. Employees can also take their information with them if they leave the company.

The company is aware of the potential privacy issues that can come out of the program, but for now those backing on the system are determined committed to making it work. They hope that they can use the system to change how the company operates or improve their attrition rate.

Image courtesy of Flickr, lululemon athletica

This article originally published at PSFK here

Topics: diets, employees, exercise, Health & Fitness, Lifestyle, startup community, Startups, tech companies PSFK is a Mashable publishing partner that reports on ideas and trends in creative business, design, gadgets, and technology. This article is reprinted with the publisher's permission.

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