Battle Workplace Weight Discrimination

 

When hit film director Kevin Smith was kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight in 2010 after the carrier declared him too fat to fly, it dramatically illustrated the challenges — and routine humiliations — overweight Americans face.

Indeed, research from Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity reported that weight discrimination increased 66 percent from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. What’s more, at a time when more than two-thirds of Americans are now overweight or obese, the Rudd Center says obesity discrimination is now more prevalent than bias based on ethnicity, sexual orientation and physical disability.

Despite these sobering statistics, no federal law protects workers from obesity-related workplace discrimination. Courts have ruled in favor of individuals who have successfully proved that their weight directly affected their job performance, but such instances are rare. At the state level, Michigan is the only state whose workplace anti-discrimination laws include body size bias — leaving most overweight workers with little recourse when it comes to protecting their rights.

“This kind of bias affects people from the time they are hired to the time they are fired,” says Rebecca Puhl, the Rudd Center’s director of research and weight stigma initiatives. “Our research shows that obese workers are less likely to be hired and less likely to be promoted,” she says. “Obese men earn on average 3 percent less than their slim counterparts — obese women more than 6 percent less.”

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