It's wrong for employers to discriminate based on style of dress

Great Debates
21

I don’t think sven is necessarily fighting the notion that employers want their staff to have a certain “look,” (she did get rid of her pink hair, after all—that does display some pragmatism), it’s the excessively picky stuff that is puzzling.

Bringing up my former employer’s “No Flat Felled Seams” rule again: What sense did it make to have such a rule, when nicely dressed (really nicely dressed, and professionally dressed too) employees are told to change their outfits, while employees wearing poorly-made bullet-proof polyester slacks are acceptable? That makes no sense. My former employer seemed to want us to drice nicely and professionally, and I had no problem with that—but I saw no sense in how they enforced their dress code, especially when most of us had no problem dressing appropriately (even with the dreaded flat-felled seams ;)).

For instance, I was technically wearing denim to work, but since it was the plain-colored denim (black or dark navy) and cut in a non-“jeans” like style (classic trouser design), no one was the wiser, because they looked just as nice as what anyone else was wearing. But had anyone looked closely and seen that the twill-like fabric of my pants was (horrors!) actually a denim-like material, judging from past behavior, they would have told me I couldn’t wear the pants anymore. And how does that make sense? If the pants look good enough and give off the right impression to customers, isn’t that what counts, rather than nit-picky rules? Apparently to some employers, no. Enforcing rules (in a nonsensical way) is apparently all that is important.

22

I’m a 45-year-old white male. I was once fired from a fast food job for having long hair. I was also told lots of times that I might be able to get hired if I would get a haircut for the interview.

I think anyone who would fire an employee solely because of how they dress or groom themself is probably an idiot. (And I fully understand that long hair when I was a kid is pretty much the same as piercings/weird-colored hair is today).

But I emphatically don’t think there should be a law against it.

The demographics have shifted considerably since 1977. Today, you can almost always find a fast-food/minimum-wage job (“shit jobs”, we called them). As such, [geezer] kids today don’t appreciate how many choices they have.[/geezer]

I considered the freedom to dress as I choose when I took the civil service job I have held for 18+ years. I have more than enough education and credentials, so I won’t get fired. But since I work for a military agency, and most people here dress pretty conservatively, I have to consider how I will be accepted by my colleagues.

I used to wear a suit and tie to work, but I gradually started dressing more casually. My hair is short now, but I wear nothing but t-shirts and jeans. I’m known as the go-to guy for crawling under benches and the like, and one of the few people within shouting distance who can figure out really tricky math problems.

I also run in the Armed Forces 5k race every year. Soldiers who’ve chased me in a footrace have a harder time thinking of me as a lazy hippie.

It’s a balance.

There was a classic episode of The Bob Newhart Show where one of his patients, a Mr. Billings, was complaining to him that he kept getting fired from jobs. He was a large, bald black man wearing a dashtiki. Bob responded in his trademark halting manner, “Well, Mr. Billings,… you are an insurance salesman”.

(Long laugh).

Mr. Billings responded “I have to be me.”

To which Dr. Bob replied, “Well, of course. But perhaps you could consider looking like someone else?”

(Later in the episode followed the scene involving Mr. Billings’ large dog that included the immortal words, “Sit, Whitey!”)

23

But then the issue is not dress code; it is control and stupidity and the dress code is simply that outfit’s particular fetish.

I know shops that enforce very strict break time and lunch times–shops filled with programmers who are willing to work through lunch to solve a user’s problem, but would like to be able to eat when the problem is solved.
I knew one manager who wanted to dock programmers for showing up a few minutes late for work–after they had worked from midnight to 7:00 a.m. to recover a system and only went home to take a shower and put on business attire, perfectly willing to come back and put in a day’s work (despite already having seven hours on the clock).

A business has a right to demand that its employees put in the time for which they are being paid and to provide coverage when customers are liable to need their services, but some companies (or managers) act stupidly when setting or enforcing rules.
At that point, the issue is no longer dress code or timeliness, but managerial nonsense.

24

Carefull where your logic is headed. Would my employer be in the wrong for firing me if I showed up to work wearing only a speedo and a “fuck you” hat? :smiley:

25

My and my long hair and my facial hair have always been either employed or unemployed as a collective unit. I may have to survive without the wages you pay if you don’t want some guy with long hair and a beard, but you have to survive without the benefits of having me working for you.

After having done one stint at a place with a dress code (started off mild, worsened), I’d come close to adding blue jeans to the list. I suppose if the choice were between taking a job I had to dress up in clothes I otherwise wouldn’t own or wear or being unemployed, I’d take it, but as long as I can find jobs that don’t impose a dress code on me, you’re not likely to land me as an employee if you insist on telling me what I’ve got to wear.

And if I were female, you would not get me into high heels under any circumstance, and if you require pantyhose you’d lose me as soon as I could find a place to work without wearing the damn things.

You deserve the employees your policies get you.

26

Dress is a way of making a statement. Sure, you aren’t making a statement. But other people are. Statements like “I am a certain age,” “I identify with this group of people, all of whom are dressed exactly like I am,” “I have at least a certain amount of money,” “I just came from a game of tennis,” “I like being taller than I am,” “Notice my <insert body part here>,” “Please don’t notice my <insert body part here>,” “I work at <job>,” “I would never in a million years work at <job>.”

They’re conciously made (or semi-conciously made) statements, and it seems just as fair for an employer to judge someone on those non-verbal statements as it is to judge them on the words that come out of their mouth at work.

27

These are the same places that provide shit customer service because their employees are not empowered to act on the things that need to be done on the job (which is why you can’t get anything done without a manager, and even then the manager will often shrug and say ‘too bad’). These are the places that do not train their employees, and do not offer any upward mobility or motivation to do a good job. These are the places that prevent their managment teams from making simple common sense and customer driven changes to the one size fits all policies. They want sheep and they hire sheep. But we all suffer.

28

I was feeling a bit pissy when I wrote the OP . . . now that I’m maybe a little more rational, I’d like to expand a little on my views and respond to some comments.

With regard to the “You can change your style of dress, but you can’t change your race” argument, I’d say yeah, that’s true, but there are many cases where your style of dress is semi-permanent, and I think these are the cases where attire-based workplace discrimination bothers me the most. Like if you dye your hair an unusual color – you can’t very easily just change it back to normal color for work. Or if you have a tattoo, or long hair, or a beard, or (like in the thread I was responding to) piercings that will close up if you take them out. I don’t really have a problem with an employer asking their employees to wear a suit, or a uniform, or what have you. Likewise I wouldn’t have a problem with them forbidding employees from showing up in “only a speedo and a ‘fuck you’ hat” like Blalron said. (Good post, by the way – helped me clarify in my own mind what I thought the difference was between reasonable and unreasonable attire requirements.) What I do have a problem with is them demanding you make such fundamental changes to your appearance that they will even effect what you look like during the time when you’re not at work. (Now you could say: But what if you have “Fuck you” tattooed on your forehead? In that case, though, I’d say it probably wouldn’t be that unreasonable to think that you really were just trying to offend people. But maybe that’s just my prejudice against “Fuck you” tattoos. ;))

Anyway if the guy with blue hair and an eyebrow ring is willing to put on a suit and tie five days a week, he’s clearly making an effort. Is it so much to ask that employers, customers, etc. make an effort to look past their prejudices against blue-haired guys with eyebrow rings?

29

I work in technical sales. I have short-ish hair and a goatee, which I keep neatly trimmed. When I see customers, I shave (except the goater, which I trim), comb my hair, and wear a suit. When I just do office work, I either work from home (buck naked if I feel like it) or if I go to the office I wear whatever I want. Customer visits are always to their sites, so a suit is always appropriate.

Any employer who arbitrarily restricts what their employees wear, without the justification of ‘customer facing’ or whatever, is just plain stupid. I understand restrictions on no ‘speedos and a fuck-you hat’ as being simply non-conducive to a professional environment, same way women wearing clubbing gear wouldn’t be.

But be realistic - right or wrong, if you want the man’s money you must follow the man’s rules. As long as they are not descriminating against your race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or other protected class then if you accept their paycheck you accept their rules.

Call me mercenary, but if they pay me enough, I’ll dress in a chicken suit and do a silly dance for my beans. I can always change out of it when I get home.

30

First off, I basically agree with the sentiment of the OP.

Howbeit, the post seems to be premised on the notion that Business is a meritocracy that seeks to hire the best people to perform a given set of tasks.

This belief is highly mistaken.

It is true that businesses act upon the query “What would customers think?” Hell, that’s why they wouldn’t hire blacks until they were forced to do so. They weren’t prejudiced, mind you, but what if a black (Hispanic, etc.) salesperson showed up at the customer’s? Why, they wouldn’t buy!

But this worry about the customers’ prejudices and hangups is just one part of something much bigger: the fact that Business is first and foremost a social system, a set of memes that itself seeks to remain in existence.

People doing hiring desperately, desperately want to hire people who are “like us.” Who are “normal.” Who won’t “make waves.” Competence is wholly a secondary consideration.

I like bow ties. I can tie a bow tie. I sometimes wear a bow tie. But if I were to show up at an interview wearing a bow tie, I think that would almost completely prevent me from getting a job in today’s climate. They would think, “Hmm, this Aeschines seems competent and nice enough, but if we had to chose between a guy who wears bow ties (which isn’t a totally orthodox thing) and a guy who wears a regular tie, who are we gonna pick? Yeah, why take chances: let’s take a regular tie guy.”

Yes, it’s that picky. Yes, it’s fricking retarded. But this is due to our primitive primate psychology and ain’t going away anytime soon.

For more information on this fascinating topic, I highly recommend Vance Packard’s The Pyramid Climbers–after more than 40 years it’s still quite on target.

31

In certain industries (namely low-level retail, fast food, or manufacturing), yes, basically what we want is a sheep or a robot because the employee is basically just an interchangeable biological interface between the register and the customer or the widget machine and the conveyer belt. The process or service has been designed or engineered to the point where responses should be automatic and predictible. That’s really the point of automation. To make it so that complex tasks that require a trained (an highly paid) specialist can be quantified and codified so that an 18 year old with a high school degree can do it.

I think you confusing not allowing your employees any autonomy over business related decisions with allowing them to express personal individuality in their style or dress. Some of the most effective companies are successful because they maintain a strict standard for their employees - dress code, personal grooming, smiling, greating the customer when they come in the store, proactively fixing problems, etc. These places generally expect a high level of professionalism from their employees, but they also tend to be very homogenius, almost cult-like in their policies.

In fact, I would argue that the places you describe are that way because of a lack of employer control, or controls that simply manifest themselves as petty or haphazard regulations. I may or may not notice that the Brooks Brothers clerk is well dressed and pleasent but I certainly noticed if the disinterested Macy’s clerk is doing her nails while watching Moesha on the close-circuit TV. The reason that low level jobs tend to have such draconian rules and regulations is that quite often the uneducateds and transient students who occupy those positions don’t know or care about what being “professional” means.
Aeschines is correct that business is a social system where “fitting in” is often more important than pure competancy. The reason for that is that very few businesses are solitary endeavors. Most jobs require being part of a team. I can tell you from personal experience that I would rather have a merely competant employee who works well with the team that a loose cannon who is the most skilled person around. Creative thinkers are good. Creative thinkers who are constantly at odds with the team and derail the project are not.

32

This might be a bit of a hijack, but in my experience as an employee, employer, former prep-school student and current professional etiquette consultant, the reason for seemingly silly distinctions such as this usually result from employees trying to ‘get over’ on the dress code through minor variances. So while they might be adhering to the policy on the face of things, the overall effect is certainly not what the employer is going for. So dress codes have evolved into a law code of sorts, complete with the language- everything must be spelled out to avoid prankish flouting of the policy (all employees must wear pants, etc.)

Also, there tends to be a gender bias in the implementation of most policies- women usually labor under much less stringent rules than men. I really get tired of being told to wear khaki pants, shirt and tie, and observe female co-workers show up in jeans and tee-shirts (hint: it’s not a ‘blouse’ if you can see the Hanes label on the back) So, fairness to other employees is also a goal of what may seem to be an overly detailed code.

33

Employers often have the wrong reason behind their limitations, too. My nose is pierced. I am fairly Americanized, and really, on appearance you can’t always even tell I’m Indian. I pierced my nose specifically to have a little bit of my culture always around me.

BJ’s wholsesale club (worked there years ago) made me take it out. I hated that. And it wasn’t my religion, so technically I had no say. But I wasn’t wearing it to be trendy or anything.

And how about the companies who pay you in pennies (seems like) but want you to dress in business casual? Well, those clothes cost big $$$$ and if you’re not getting paid well, then you can’t really afford nice things. I don’t think companies think about it, just issue blanket policies. And I see no problem with long hair, facial piercings…if the person is neat and clean and does a good job. But that’s just me.

34

I’m in software. Twenty years ago, when I started out, I had a job interviewed lined up at a universitry computing center. My mother was convinced that I should shave my beard. It was well groomed, not a bird’s nest.

I had the same attitude as the OP but my mother put the fear of God in me.
Still I wouldn’t shave it.

I go to the interview and it’s three guys who interview me in a round-table scenario. And all three guys had beards!

I was lucky. But it’s like someone else said, if you’re trying out for a job in a CD store, the pink hair and pearcings probably help, but skip the banking job.

35

This is my attitude as well. Two of my current jobs require me to wear a uniform. Both jobs are very strict about the dress code.

For my Crossing Guard job, the uniform is practical. Anybody that complains about having to wear a uniform/conform to their criteria needs to get their head checked. At this job I need to be recognized, and it is a safety issue as much as it is a social one. Much of the time we spend at this job is alone, or with one other guard. Our dispatcher (supervisor) will randomly visit to talk briefly. Usually these are mundane “Hello, Incubus, how is your family? Dont forget the xmas party” type conversations, but the purpose of the visit is to make sure we are doing what we are supposed to be doing. Because the dispatcher seemingly shows up at random, and because the sheriff’s department works in the same building as they do, we always have to make sure we follow the dress code every single day. Several weeks ago, I had the misfortune to lose my hat :eek: . After spending several hours searching in vain, I decided to simply drive to the uniform store and buy a new one, that way I would have a hat during my afternoon shift. Could I have taken my chances and worked 1 shift hat-less? Yes, but the dispatcher could have shown up that day, and chewed me out for not wearing my hat. Contrary to even sven’s opinion, this job pays quite well, with raises every year and a generous uniform allowance (I have several uniforms now, so the allowance is more of a ‘bonus’ for me :smiley: ). Getting it wasn’t easy, I had to submit to a very thorough background check and spend an hour being grilled ah I mean ‘interviewed’ :wink: by the sheriff. Initially my chances were not good, and not even because of my appearance, which was very clean-cut. It was because they didn’t like to hire students because they typically weren’t reliable. However, I proved my reliability there and I am one of the youngest Crossing Guards working for San Jose :smiley:

My other job is at a tutoring center, and that job involves interacting with both children and parents. That job also has a strict dress code, but in this case it is mainly because of the parents. Many families are extremely fickle, and will quit over the most mundane things. The center I work at, however, has one of the lowest ‘quit’ rates in the entire country thanks to in part to the professionalism of the staff. Those employees that do not follow the rules generally do not last long. Despite a rule against wearing facial jewelry, one particular employee got his eyebrow pierced while he was employed. Now, the piercing itself wasn’t a problem, but he was wearing a bar through it. The district manager saw this and told him to remove it. He refused, because the hole would close, and out the door he went. :smack: In this scenario, the employee knew full well the rules involved with appearance.

36

I figured that was probably what started it. However, the stupid anal-retentive rule was being enforced in a stupid, blind sort of way. If the goal of our employers was to get us to dress “nicely,” I would think that employees who dressed more than “nicely” would not be repremanded. But that is what would happen. Dressing by any standards in a “classy” or “nice” way was not enough. You had to adhere to the rules, while those who dressed in a far less “classy” or “nice” way were okay, because they adhered to the rules. End result: some employees weren’t allowed to dress as “nicely” as they ordinarily might have. Confusing message.

That’s another thing. It seems the less they pay you, the “nicer” they want you to dress.

37

I meant to tell about my job at the “special drinks” counter at the movie theatre, too, long ago. We served thinkgs like frozen cappuchinos, limeades, etc.

We had to wear tucked-in white shirts with red vests. Okey-dokey. They provided the vests, at least. But we also had to wear nice black slacks, that we provided. The problem?

We were in a 6 x 10 area, maybe. The area was elevated, and enclosed. Three girls on busy days. Well, by the end of the day, we had served so many drinks and were so freakin’ busy, that the floor would be covered in *puddles * of sticky, sloppy, wet, disgusting fruity, drinky, stuff. That’s the only word to describe it. Stuff. So your nice slacks cuffs would be dragging through this shit, unless you wanted to pull an Urkle and hike your pants up to your nipples.

Oh, that was a disgusting job.

38

Allow me to re-post part of what I OP’ed in my LJ (which was, incidentally, sparked by a Pit Thread).

39

Anyone who works for me or for the same company represent that company. While I want the best workers I can find, most of my work is done in my clients’ offices (I’m a investment management consultant employed by a large private firm). Therefore, I need employees who will not lose me any business. I cannot afford to cherry-pick my clients based upon whom will accept long-haired, ponytailed men (which I was, once) or overly adorned women. If I am to hire you, or if I am assigned you, you will look and behave like a financial industry professional, or you will not work with me (boss’ kids notwithstanding :wink: ). I’ve been on the other side of the desk (evaluating consultants) and I know it matters.

40

Yeah right…not like those Wall Street slobs I see wearing JPMorgan sweatpants to work every day.