It's not "work apparel, it's a fuckin Uniform and I don't want to wear it!

The BBQ Pit
21

I can appreciate you wanting to stand up against having to do something you didn’t agree to do when you were hired. Overall, I’m sympathetic, though I agree (and it appears that you do too) that this isn’t THAT big a deal.

On the other hand…I’d freaking LOVE it if my company bought me shirts that I had to wear every day, as long as they were comfortable. One less thing I’d have to think of every morning when I get out of bed. They have logo-ed scrubs available for purchase, but I’m not going to pay for them.

22

Well, I’m sure she’s glad to have YOU on her “team”. Nothing quite like an employee deliberately making an unpleasant job worse.

Here we have a low level manager trying desperately to make an order from on high palatable to you. Trying her best to avoid having you quit over something as juvenile as a shirt. All you want to do is make it harder and harder on her, on purpose, to punish her for following orders that she was given.

You’re just being a dick.

23

Good Lord. This thread is largely composed of the baaaahing of several corporate, suck-up sheep, interspersed with the reality and common sense of a few people with backbones.

The lengths that some of you go to when rationalizing your flaccid job mentality and behavior is staggering. No surprise there - you’re probably more crappy managers-in-the-making.

Boyo Jim, I’m on your side. There is no end to the idiocy that middle managers can wreak on their subordinates in the name of team-building, corporate identity, efficiency, or whatever other silly BS they come with. Time and again this comes up - managers forgetting what the hell their jobs are about.

Managers are supposed to exist in order to make their people happier, more effective and productive, and ultimately, to help make their companies more profitable and vital. Instead, managers more typically decide (deliberately or otherwise) that they are the locus of attention and contribution, that they must validate their jobs, and then act in subtly perverse ways that are contrary to corporate and capitalist values.

Unfortunately, this is a key pillar that supports the inefficiency, ineptitude, and short-sighted view of American business. The problem is that most managers out there are ineffective managers. We all know this, whether or not we want to admit it.

If healthy capitalism is indeed a key aspect of America’s national strength, and this strength if crucial to America’s long-term vitality and survival, then the hundreds of thousands of misguided corporate managers that lessen the effectiveness, productivity, and moral of employees undermine our country and America’s collective future, and tilt the capitalist advantage in favor of other countries.

And with that, I realize that I’m coffee-deprived. Off my wobbly soapbox I go.

24

Boyo Jim I’m with you on the uniform. Resisting is, at the very least, good for your personhood. Not resisting will turn you into something like the people who’ve posted here chewing you out for not resisting. Fate worse than death, if you know what I mean.

That said, as a person who wore a suit to work for a decade, a suit IS a uniform. It’s the uniform that managers and CEOs wear, but make no mistake, it’s a uniform all the same.

25

If the hospital is telling managers to require all employees to wear the shirts with the company logos and if this manager hasn’t let it be known that it is indeed hospital wide policy that everyone wear these shirts, then she isn’t doing her job.
Boyo Jim has already stated he’ll do it if he’s told it’s policy but as of yet hasn’t been directly told that by his manager. She needs to get off her ass and either say it’s a requirement or not. Hell, I’m the rules and regs/policy and procedure sob. It is my job to make sure employees understand this stuff. If I don’t do it, then they can’t know what their job requirements are. Again, she needs to get off her ass and say what the policy on wearing uniform shirts is.

Until then, Boyo Jim is right in assuming it’s optional.

26

My husband has refused to shave or cut his hair since 1967. He told his current employer asking him to cut his hair would be akin to asking him to cut his arm off :rolleyes: . He’s been with the same employer for 19 years. He hasn’t had a promotion and would never be hired anywhere else TODAY due to his age and look, but hey…he’s maintained his look. He won the battle, but has lost the war as far as I’m concerned.

Yes, I agree it shouldn’t make a difference. The quality of the work is what’s important. But the only person who’s impressed by the stand is the person making the stand.

Wear the shirt.

27

In one sense, I agree with you. If Boyo Jim thought his boss would give up on the shirt thing, or didn’t think it was a definite requirement, I’d be with you. OTOH, he indicated that he already knows it’s a requirement, coming from above his bosses head, he’s just trying to force her to make it an order. That’s the thing I don’t like about it.

28

I too am quite surprised at just how many people are urging the OP to shut up and roll over, like a good drone. There’s nothing petty or childish about
not wanting to casually throw away one’s individuality; after not wearing a uniform at a workplace, suddenly it is mandatory, why? If one was up front with clients and customers that might be another thing, but if you’re at a desk in the back where noone ever sees you but coworkers - why a uniform?

Count me with the “Fuck 'ems”. If it was me I would say Oh That’s Fine Boss, Someone else can be the DJ this year.

29

At my previous job the boss I started with explained the dress code for our department as requiring a shirt with a collar, solid or patterned, and no jeans. I bought a collection of twill pants, jeans-cut, and some plaids I liked. No problem.

New boss came onboard and changed the code to require long-sleeved solid shirts and a tie. I bought the shirts but, hating neckties, wore a bolo tie until I was called aside and told that wasn’t sufficient. After shopping throughout Manhattan and seeing nothing I was willing to wear as a necktie, I made my own from trim bought in the garment district and spent the next three months finding another job.

I don’t work there any more.

Keep the faith.

30

I disagree that a suit is a uniform. With a suit you can pick your own suit, own shirt, own tie, own shoes. There is a lot of possibility for expression there.

(Unless it’s one of those demented, stick-up-the-ass places where suits have to be somber and dark with no bright ties etc.)

31

This is really confusing. I am wondering if upper management has issued orders that all employees wear the shirts or if they are “encouraging” everyone to wear them voluntarily. If it’s being presented as voluntary then I can see why Boyo Jim’s boss hasn’t said everyone has to wear the shirts. If it is an order issued by upper management and she hasn’t said so, then she is at fault for not doing so, regardless of her personal feelings about it. It just needs to be stated one way or the other. If it is voluntary she needs to say so. If it’s mandatory she needs to say so. She needs to clarify this for everyone in the department.

32

In what Bizarro Mirror Universe does it rob you of your self-respect to wear a shirt with a logo on it? What kind of pathetic loser derives self-respect from clothing? Jesus, you’re not a teenager anymore. “I can totally wear the clothes I want! Fight the power, doooodz!” is not how self-respecting adults approach life. Grow up.

In a world where some employees have to put up with employers who actually do bad things, like harassing them or screwing them over vacation or cutting their hours so they don’t quality for benefits or treating them unfairly in work assignment or any number of things that, you know, actually matter, you’re bitching about them asking you to wear a shirt they’re giving you for FREE? I can hear the world’s smallest violin out there somewhere.

33

I dunno. I was kind of similar.

I work at a place that does I.T. work, IP video, and just plain surveillance work.

As an IT guy, it’s kind of standard to wear the polo shirt with the company logo on it. I never had a problem with that, and the company had always supplied me with five or so shirts to wear.

Well, The Boss used to work for IBM sales in the golden days. You wore the right clothes, you wore the right shirt, your hair was cut a certain way, and by motherfucking god, you drive the right kind of car.

So, he decides that he wants everyone (everyone meaning everyone but him, his step-daughter receptionist, his accountant son, and our other salesman) to start wearing uniforms. Specifically, Cintas-supplied blue near-rubber pants (great in Mississippi, let me tell you), and a white shirt with blue pinstripes. Horrible, but it gets worse. On the right breast is a badly-applied iron-on patch that says “IP Video Technology” and on the left breast is another patch with “[Company Name*]”.

I swear to god, these things looked like something a plumber or a Sears employee is forced to wear. And, no, I’m not a Sears employee. If I were, I’d accept wearing such a thing as part of the job. If I were a plumber, I’d be making about three times what I do.

There were actually occasions when I wore the damned things. On those occasions I’d be at a client location…say, a school. On one trip to a school I had two teachers ask if I was there to fix the air conditioning, and a third ask me if I could take a look at the sink in her room.

So, after a very short time I stopped wearing the things. Months went by with me dressed the way I always had before - polo shirt and khakis.

At the end of a particularly bad day he decides to call me into his office along with his son (the accountant and, did I mention, the company VP?) and pushes the issue of the Maytag Uniforms.

We went back and forth and back and forth until he decides to get it all out there with, “Well, at IBM we either had to do it their way or we were gone.”

Hmm. Before I give my response, let it be known that I’ve been at this place for nearly three years. In that time our sales have quadrupled. I’m the lead technical person in a place that is a technical business. Furthermore, it is completely and totally understood by everyone who works here (except for our receptionist, who is dumb as a stump), as well as our clients that I am the single reason this place has managed to stay in business so far. This ain’t hubris, it’s a simple fact.

So, I respond with “Is that the way it is here, then?”.

The Boss stops in the middle of what he was about to say and goes pale. His son gets his frequent deer-in-the-headlights look. A friend/coworker of mine who was standing in the doorway watching the conversation does a double-take, turns, and leaves the room.

Needless to say, I don’t dress as the Maytag Man.

In your case, though, is it so bad? They want you to wear what I was fighting rather messily to keep! On second thought, though, if you don’t wanna, you don’t wanna.

-Joe, free spirit, and a real bitch sometimes

*Somehow, this patch is so badly done, that on some of them you have [Company Name] with [Company Name] visible in a second printing at a 30 degree angle.

34

For several years, I had a side job as a maintenance tech for the local multiplex cinema. It was on-call work - on a Saturday night I might have to go in and unplug a toilet, or fix a popcorn machine, or show up at 6 am on Sunday to paint the hallways so they’d be dry by the time the place opened for the matinee. The pay was decent for a part-time job, but the free-movies-anytime-for-employee-and-family benefit was what made the job great. A couple of hours a week in exchange for all the Hollywood we could stand.

Eventually, the chain closed down that standalone theatre and built a sparkly new facility attached to the mall across the street. Mall maintenance was going to pick up the responsibility for all the little repairs and renovations that I had been doing for years. The management of the cinema offered to keep me on as a part-time ticket-taker - still a couple of hours a week, same pay grade (woo hoo!), and same bennie of free movies. Oh, yeah, I’d have to wear a uniform, too, white shirt, black vest, black pants, cinema would pay for them, no problem, right?

Bullshit. Big problem. No fucking pockets in the pants.

See, they didn’t want to take any chances that a guy who had keys to the fucking building for ten years and twenty-four-hour access to every nook and cranny of the place might suddenly get larcenous and start stealing their fucking candy.

I offered to buy my own black dress pants and wear those on duty. No dice. Company standard says “Wear a Uniform”. If I were to buy my own pants, it wouldn’t be Uniform, it would be Individual.

I put the uniforms in a pile on the manager’s desk with my keys to the building and never walked in the door as an employee again.

So, Boyo Jim, I agree with you.

35

What I wear to work I consider to already be my “uniform”. The clothing I have to wear in the office is the type of clothing I do not wear casually, and I generally have to pay more for it than I do for my casual clothing.

I would love to have the company supply me with free shirts to wear. My clothing doesn’t dictate who I am, and I have no desire to make any kind of fashion statement at work.

36

So, assuming that this new policy of forcing bar codes on your flesh and identity tags under your skin comes about and you refuse, but instead of getting incinerated, you are fired/quit and apply for a new job, one that requires logoed clothing (whoops, uniforms), would you turn it down?

37

Well, I would never accept a job at a place that would require me to wear a polo shirt.

I can’t believe the number of people in here telling the OP to “suck it up.” Y’all are a middle-manager’s wet dream, you are.

38

I also have to side with the OP. This might not be a battle you can win but at least you won’t go down without a fight (however futile :smiley: )

In the end, I would simply stop going to company outings and make sure they know why. This whole DJ thing is confusing, you originally created this “position” and now they’re forcing you to continue? Fuck that! I would point out that it’s not your job to DJ anything and you’ve simply lost interest doing so in the future.

I really hate this sort of thing. I personally might start looking quietly for another job.

39

Some of them probably ARE middle managers. The rest, well, their spirits are just broken, is all. I’ve worn uniforms to make a buck when I needed to, but I always remembered to hate it and look for other jobs.

40

While I could do without the bile in your post, I will be happy to explain what I mean. You seem to be looking at this issue only on a physical level. On that level, you are correct. It is, at the end of the day, just a shirt. It is also true that this physical object lacks the power to either rob me of dignity or to give me dignity (just as a gun lacks the power to kill me until someone pulls the trigger).

What I am getting at is something altogether different. It is the need that some managers feel to make their subordinates do things that add no value to the business and are arbitrary, stupid and damage moral. It seems to get worse every time it is an employer’s market.

As a self-respecting adult, I would resent someone intruding in to something as basic as the clothes that I put on my body unless there was a legitimate need for it that will help the business that I am selling my labor to in a tangible way. For example, if you are off site I could see how branding could be a good idea. Likewise, if the set up is such that customers or potential customers might have trouble locating an employee, a uniform would also be appropriate. I am sure that there would be other conditions where I could see the need.