I would never put a no tattoo policy in place if I were in charge just so we are clear.
I’m not sure just what sort of fight you are proposing. It’s already been made clear that it’s not legally actionable. You could try the PR route but I doubt that most of the general population would give a shit or be swayed by your fat person argument.
What specifically do you propose that the OP do?
True. I’m just pointing out that it is hypocritical to advise to shut up and take it just because those posters have a personal dislike of tattooing.
This was my first thought as well, and would be a reasonable thing for the company to consider. Unfortunately, nobody can force them to be reasonable.
If the individuals you worked with on the previous policy are still around, that might be a good place to start, from the direction of simply asking questions to help you clarify the new policy in your mind, without being confrontational. “Is there a grandfather clause?” “Must I cover my tats while alone in my own office?” This might give you an idea of how strictly they plan to enforce this, and might give them some ideas about revising it in the future.
In the end, though, if you’re an at-will employee they can legally kick you to the curb for any reason or no reason at all. Make sure your resume is in order, but in the meantime, continue to be a valuable employee and communicate with your supervisors often to gauge how thick the ice is for you. Good luck!
This is one of the main reasons why I have never entertained the idea of getting a tattoo. I also tell my children to think twice about getting one, especially if it’s visible when wearing normal clothes.
At a minimum, having been a spokesperson before, they should gather up all the people affected by the policy and demand a meeting with HR and management to work out how they are going to be affected. They should discuss moderating the policy to something more reasonable; and if that is unacceptable to management, they should demand a grandfather clause to protect them from random idiocy, and probably fight for a minor clothing allowance to help get them over the hump of adjusting to the policy. Further, they should demand that the policy be made very clear to all people interviewing for positions with the company to prevent new-hire turnover due to the zero tolerance policy. As to how to enforce it? I don’t know, start an online PR campaign? It’s worked before in the past.
True enough – if someone would advise another in similar (i.e. fat) circumstances to fight the issue, but roll over on the tattoo business, and does so solely because of a dislike of tattooing, that’s hypocritical.
(bolding mine)
Maybe I’m just a defeatist by nature, but I’d guess that for a group of employees doing this much demanding, things might not end well.
I don’t know what world you’re from Acid Lamp, but in my world at a lot of employers that advice would just get you labeled a troublemaker and fired. I think it’s extremely reckless to be giving that advice to someone you do not know, at a company you are unfamiliar with.
It’s one thing if it’s at a business where you know they are generally “okay” with employee PR campaigns and employees “making demands for clothing allowances” and etc, but I’d wager businesses like that are the exception. You’ve just given horrible career advice.
My random thoughts:
•I work in publishing, which can be extremely conservative or extremely open/liberal depending on who’s in charge. At some jobs, tattoos were completely forbidden, while in others, everyone was a tattooed and pierced freak. When I got mine, I took care to ensure it was placed on my body in a way that I could hide it easily if I thought that would be appropriate for the situation. It’s high on my outside right thigh and only the shortest, not-appropriate-for-work skirts reveal it. I have plans for another one that would be visible in a tank top, but not a sleeveless shirt (it’ll be on my shoulder).
•I have no problem whatsoever with tattoos and piercings. About 10 or so years ago, I was hiring a copywriter for a desktop publishing team. He was highly recommended, highly qualified and highly skilled, and he had a face full of piercings. The company was in the middle on the conservative-to-liberal scale but there was no face-to-face customer contact at all. My only concern was the Chairman of the Board, who could be weirdly inconsistent about things like that. So I told this potential employee: I realize it’s a part of you and personally, I would never ask you to take out your piercings for any reason; I’m cool with them. However, we might have to send you to the Chairman’s office to pitch a marketing campaign. He might not think your piercings are so cool. How might you react if he asked you to remove them? He sort of danced around the question a bit and told me that he’d volunteered to remove them for a friend’s wedding because he thought that was appropriate for the occasion–the friend hadn’t asked him to. It became a non-issue by the end of the first day. As it turned out, he was such a great employee that nobody really noticed or thought much about his piercings; they became invisible as you got to know him. He ended up working closely with the Chairman on several occasions and nobody ever said a word to him about it, nor was he ever asked to remove the piercings.
• If I were in the OP’s position, I’d invest in a few long-sleeved shirts, some tattoo-concealing makeup, and polish up my resume with an eye toward finding a more creative and artistic industry to work in, where individual expression like tattoos and piercings are accepted or even encouraged. Or you could wear bandages and pretend you injured yourself on the job and make the bosses worry about potential Workman’s Comp claims. Heh.
• I bought steel-toed boots once from a guy who was covered in tattoos and piercings and who also had a purple mohawk. I’ve seen people like that at a lot of shows and always wondered where you get a job when you have something like a purple mohawk, a face full of safety pins, and both arms tattooed with full sleeves? One possibility, apparently, is working in a t-shirt-boots-head shop. 
Oh bollocks. The same could be said for any policy no matter how draconian. Either you stand up for yourself, or simply be bullied and used until you get fed up. I prefer to at least attempt to work with, and alter the system rather than just letting it ram me in the ass until I get fired. I care about results and service from employees, not appearance.
I’m the opposite. I hire people where I work. Even though my organization does not work with the public, I will not hire someone with a visible tattoo. If I see a tattoo on an existing employee, they are promptly told to cover it up.
I was going to post basically the same thing.
“Demand” a meeting with HR?
“Demand” a grandfather clause?
Acid Lamp, you do realize that the OP does not own the company, right?
And there are tons of unemployed people willing to take her job in a heartbeat.
She’s in no position to “demand” anything. And in business and life in general, “demanding” something is generally a poor approach unless you have enough leverage to get what you want. She’s got zero leverage.
That’s great advice for people who place warm fuzzy self-righteous feelings above a paycheck and the bills it covers. Maybe the OP is secretly independently wealthy and is only working at a bank for fun. For the rest of us in grown-up land, antagonizing an employer, especially a big faceless conservative corporate one, like a bank, is a bad idea.
Get the policy in writing, adhere to it scrupulously, and find another job that rewards your performance, not your adherance to their silly antediluvian notions about how a back-office worker should look. And do not bring up the tatoo policy change when an interviewer asks you why your are looking for a new job.
I’m sorry to hear about this situation. I strongly disagree that tattoos are a distraction or unprofessional, and I’m a middle-aged guy with no tattoos or piercings. I think, though, that the writing is on the wall: your workplace has changed into an environment you don’t want to work in.
The bad signs are legion. Policies with no regard for workplace culture; blanket policies in general that don’t distinguish between different areas; concern with image over substance; having “mystery shoppers” (=spies) in the first place.
For your individual situation, you can probably come to an agreement, but that puts the people who are “tolerating” your tattoos in jeopardy with their bosses, and that’s not really good to them.
I don’t think there’s any way to get the message through to the people who need to hear it, unfortunately. You’ll have to rely on informal communication from those who know they lost a good colleage because of a narrow-minded set of rules.
Where do you live? In America (where almost no one says bollocks, which is why I ask) employers fire people that start making “demands” and try to rile up the other employees.
I think if you have a problem with a policy, you can talk about it, individually and feel out if there is any chance of them giving you any exceptions or leeway. If not, you need to look for another job.
There is an inherently unequal relationship between employee and employer in this economy and any economy where there is not a labor shortage. There are millions of Americans who essentially gave up on ever finding a job and have permanently left the workforce (look at our current labor participation rate.) Concepts like “don’t let yourself get bullied” are pretty meaningless to an employer who can replace you in a relatively short period of time.
Do you own the company? If not, who delegated you the authority to police visible tattoos? The owner himself? Board of directors? I could easily see myself telling you to go make sweet, tender love to yourself if this is just you using your position to enforce your personal preferences.
Florida, where you can get fired for anything and pound sand if you try to do anything about it. My company has an open door policy, and when something came down the pipe that I thought was ill thought out, and likely to be counter productive I demanded a meeting. A demand is nothing more than a firm request, it doesn’t have to be an ultimatum. I will not go begging to a supervisor like Oliver Twist. I’m a grown adult, a good worker, and I demand a certain amount of respect; which I in turn give to everyone else I work with. I didn’t get everything I would have wanted from the meeting, but the policy was amended to something that was sensible and not likely to cause lost revenue in the form of wasted time. Further, it put me on the radar, and I’m occasionally consulted by management now when they are forming policy decisions that are likely to affect everyone. I prefer to be engaged with what is going on rather than just keep my head down and try to duck under and get by as much as possible. I have to spend a significant amount of my day at work all week, so I prefer to be as involved as possible in making that time as pleasant and efficient as I can.
I’m curious - what’s your motivation here?
I live in Florida too, and have a little anecdote to sort of support Acid Lamp’s position. Not that I agree with storming in and demanding meetings (and I don’t really think AL is suggesting that), but sometimes there’s a way to handle these things.
Years ago, my company moved into a brand new building in a swanky part of town. When our office was in the ghetto, the dress code policies were pretty relaxed. But when we moved to the swank, TPTB decided we should polish our image as a company, so they developed a much stricter dress code policy, which included no capri pants or anything resembling capri pants. We were instructed – and even asked to make a public commitment in a management meeting – to enforce the policy strictly, and when in doubt, err on the side of conservatism.
Shortly thereafter, one of my long-time, awesomest employees wore some “flood” pants to work. It was a really nice, professional outfit with which I had no problem. However, the way she was sitting caused these pants to ride up to almost her knees and her cubicle was in a high-traffic area. Another manager walked through my department, noticed her pants, and detoured into my office to report “inappropriate dress.” The manager even said, “I don’t have a problem personally with what she’s wearing, but I’m concerned a VP might walk through here and you’ll both be in trouble.” I agreed on both points, so I called the employee into my office and asked her to go home and change. I assured her I would pay her for the time out of the office (I viewed this as a work assignment). She refused, stating that her pants were not capri pants and they were perfectly appropriate. I told her I agreed with her position, but I’d made a commitment to my superiors that I would enforce the policy on the strict side, I’d had a complaint, and I had the concern about the VPs getting bent up about it. She got mad and stalked out of my office.
I had to call HR and explain what was going on. HR lady calls my boss – a VP – and the two of them came down to my office to tag-team this poor woman (who really hadn’t done anything wrong). She walked in, saw who all was in there, and knew she’d lost the battle. After realizing that HR would force my hand and require me to fire her for insubordination if she didn’t go home and change, she agreed to do so.
When she returned, I thanked her and said this, “I can’t change the policy. And I think this policy is stupid, unclear, and leaves too much room for interpretation. I only made you do this because people above my pay grade are taking strict enforcement very seriously. You, however, can do something about this. Call the employee hotline (a toll-free number employees can use to anonymously report wrongdoing) and complain about the policy. This will trigger an investigation and we might be able to get the policy re-worked so it’ll be more reasonable. I’m sorry to have been a hard-ass about this, but I think this is our only way.”
I really hated being that dick manager about it, but I’d looked the President of the company right in the eye and committed to her that I’d be a dick about it if necessary. My employee called the hotline and a few days later, another VP called me into her office to launch the investigation. She sent me to another manager on the investigation team, with whom I met and proposed several tweaks to the policy for clarification. In the end, those tweaks were accepted by the management team and my employee was allowed to wear her flood pants to work again. (They were really cool and she had these awesome matching magenta patent-leather shoes that went with. I loved that outfit. Looked great with her coloring.)
So, in the end, in an at-will right-to-work state, the employee won the stupid policy war, despite losing the first battle. Sometimes marching in and making demands works, but sometimes you have to go through the back door and work the system that’s available to you.
May the OP do with that what she will.
My longtime customers. Air Force engineers and managers. Extremely conservative bunch.
My rule: if you won’t cover up, you won’t have a job.