- Position‹2 of 2
- No, the weight of fashion models should not be policed
- Argument‹2 of 2
Fashion models are autonomous
Models are subject to different rules. Therefore it is much harder to submit to regulations and attempting to can turn into a legal battle.
The argument
There are certain countries with regulated BMI standards for their models, and this argument holds that importing such a rule would run into two obstacles: anti-discrimination law, and the employment status of models themselves. The legal obstacle comes first. The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration can monitor the safety of modeling agencies, so a body with jurisdiction over working conditions does exist. But a weight threshold would not operate as a safety standard; it would operate as a hiring bar. Turning away someone from a position because of a disability is against the law, and anorexia nervosa is included among the conditions that count under the Americans with Disabilities Act — so a rule excluding models below a given BMI would exclude some people precisely on the basis of a protected condition. The same law's logic applies more broadly, because agencies also cannot discriminate against body type, which is exactly what a regulation placed on BMI would require them to do. A further difficulty is that BMI is a poor proxy for the thing such a rule is meant to detect. People can fall below a certain BMI and still be considered healthy, so a threshold set to catch unhealthy models will also catch healthy ones and bar them from work on the basis of a measurement that says nothing about their condition. The second obstacle is contractual. Fashion models do not have to follow the same rules as regularly employed people, because they are contracted through agencies rather than employed by them, and are not required to perform in certain shows or designs. They choose which work to accept. Because models are autonomous contractors whose bodies cannot lawfully be made a hiring criterion, the argument concludes that the weight of fashion models should not be policed.
Premises
Counter-arguments
OSHA cannot monitor independently contracted employees because they do not fall under a specific company. They are their employers, so they cannot follow the same rules. There are work-a-rounds to this rule, and that is that individual agencies would need to create rules that only allow models with a BMI above a certain number are allowed to participate. This would require an alteration to the OSHA rules and the Americans with Disability Act.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] OSHA cannot monitor fashion models because they do not work for one specific company.