Workers charge UPS with discrimination

After 2 years, 8 Muslim women were told their skirts posed a safety hazard

A group of eight Toronto women fired by courier company UPS for refusing to shorten their hemlines, will go before a human rights tribunal today.

The women, who worked for the company as temporary workers for nearly two years, claim the company discriminated against them when it refused to hire them permanently.

All eight women are of Somali origin and Muslim. They always wore ankle-length skirts to work.

Anisa Hagi, who first started working at UPS through a temp agency in 2005, said the company never told the women their clothing posed a safety hazard while they were working as temps.

But when a new union contract forced UPS to hire the women permanently and give them better pay and benefits, they were told they would have to raise their hemlines or lose their jobs, said Hagi.

A supervisor told Nadifo Yusuf that the floor-length skirts the women had worn to work for every day for nearly two years were a tripping hazard.

All eight women refused to shorten their skirts and were laid off.

"You can't keep workers for — in some cases — as many as 27 months, never once raise a health and safety issue and then use health and safety as an excuse to turf people at the point in which you would have had to pay them more," Jacqui Chic, the lawyer representing the women, told the CBC.

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