L’Oréal found guilty of discriminatory hiring

By Rick Mitchell

PARIS--In a case which could have high reputational stakes, sources say, a Paris appeals court this month fined a subsidiary of the French cosmetics giant L’Oréal S.A. and two other companies €30,000 each for discriminatory hiring. The court reversed an earlier criminal-court decision to throw out all charges.

According to court papers, the L’Oréal subsidiary, Laboratoires Garnier—the French unit of Glattbrugg, Switzerland-based temporary employment agency Adecco—and Adecco’s marketing subsidiary, Ajilon, were each fined €30,000. They were ordered to jointly pay €30,000 in damages and interest, plus court costs to Paris-based SOS Racisme, the antidiscrimination group, which filed the original charges and appeal.

Considering appeal

A spokesman for L’Oréal said the company would appeal the decision, while Adecco also said it reserved the right to appeal in the Cour De Cassation, France's highest appeal court.

Analysts said the case—in which an Ajilon manager was accused of describing job candidates using a racial term made famous by France's far right Front National political party—was symbolically significant.

France’s state antidiscrimination watchdog, the Haute Autorité de Lutte Contre Les Discriminations et Pour L’Egalité, which filed a brief in the case, said that “with this decision, the court condemns not only one person, but also a collective process of discriminatory decisions.”

Dominique Tricaud, a Paris-based lawyer who represented SOS Racisme, said Adecco faces another, still unresolved, case in which it is charged with using codes in its files to indicate job candidates' race, to make it easier to meet customers' demands.

"This [L'Oreal] case is unprecedented in the sense that there are so many big companies involved and so many victims. We've seen other cases, but none on this scale."

"The case is the first time in France we've managed to demonstrate such an organized system for employment discrimination," he added.

Anne-Marie Fournier, insurance director at Paris-based PPR S.A. and newly elected vice-present of the Association pour le Management des Risques et des Assurances de l'Entreprise, said the case highlighted the need for risk managers and human resources managers to work together.

"These cases are not as common in France as in Anglo-saxon countries. In France we're still not very sensitized to the need to pay attention to this problem," she said.

"As an employer you can still think that you won't be pursued in justice or that you can explain your way out of it. But this certainly shows a need for cooperation and discussion between the risk manager and the human resources and ethics-development people in the company. Everyone has to work together, contributing his [area of] competence," she added.

Racial criteria

The June 2006 criminal case examined alleged racial discrimination by Garnier, Adecco and Ajilon in July 2000 as Garnier prepared to promote its Fructis Style hair gel products in supermarkets across France. According to court papers, Garnier contracted Ajilon, then named Districom, to manage the events. Adecco allegedly used racial criteria in recruiting young women to host the events, under pressure from Garnier.

In rejecting the charges, the criminal court found that “none of the [witnesses who testified] had definitely been present when a discriminatory hiring practice [allegedly] took place,” concluding that a case could not be based on “assumptions and approximations.”

The L'Oreal spokesman said: “There was no new evidence presented [in the appeal phase]. There is absolutely nothing proving that discrimination took place in this affair. So how can you drop all charges in the first case and have a conviction in the second?”

The appeals court rejected charges against Laurent Dubois, Garnier’s former head, and Jacques Delsaut, general director at Adecco, but sentenced Ajilon’s then-manager, Thérèse Coulange, to a suspended three-month prison term and ordered her to contribute to compensation to SOS Racisme. The prosecution had requested a €100,000 fine for Ms. Coulange.

Court papers say that in July 2000, Ms. Coulange e-mailed an Adecco colleague indicating that women hired for the Garnier events should be “18 to 22 years old, BBR, size 40 maximum.” The parties all agree that the acronym “BBR” stands for bleu, blanc and rouge--blue, white and red--the colors of the French flag. However, they disagree on what Ms. Coulange meant by using it.

Ms. Coulange testified that she had acted on her own initiative and that she had no racist intent. She said she used the acronym to mean “the [recruited hostesses] had to speak French perfectly.” The appeals court rejected this argument: “[the acronym] was frequently used by recruitment agencies to indicate that the recruited person had to be white.” the court said.

Four discriminations

It noted that several Districom employees testified that “it became rapidly clear that there was a discriminatory policy based on origin and not on competence, practiced under pressure from Garnier.”

An SOS Racisme spokeswoman said the organization’s legal team “intended to demonstrate a discriminatory system that implicated all the links in the recruitment chain, including Garnier, Adecco and Districom-Ajilon.”

She said: “This employment offer contained four kinds of discrimination: sex, age, weight and skin color. The acronym BBR ... is the expression used by the Front National to indicate whites.”

SOS Racisme said some 1,000 applicants were affected and that “of 300 women hired, less than 5% were non-BBR, although 10% of the applicants were non-BBR.”

The L’Oréal spokesman argued that “Fructis Style is a multiethnic product aimed at all consumers throughout France. It would have been counterproductive to make a hiring stipulation based on skin color, and there is no proof that Garnier made such an order,” he said. He added that Garnier’s appeal will ensure the case continues for several more years.

The SOS Racisme spokesperson said that “by failing to acknowledge its grave errors, L’Oréal’s managers have decided to dig a deeper hole for themselves, using their financial and media power in bad faith.” Promising “to battle this stock-market powerhouse” the organization held a rally in Paris in late July “to reveal to the public the true nature of the L’Oréal company,” it said.

(Appeared July 30, 2007)