Normally, sure. But working with people’s genitals is a routine part of a waxer’s job. If you’re squeamish about genitals, you’re not cut out to be a bikini waxer.
Keep in mind that a job requirement doesn’t have to be necessary, it just has to be reasonable. If I have a pizza place, I might decide that I want all my employees to wear a company shirt. An employee doesn’t want to wear the shirt and says that another pizza place a few blocks away doesn’t make its employees wear a company shirt. Which may be true, but I can still make the shirt mandatory at my business and fire anyone who refuses to wear it.
So the spa will presumably argue that receiving a bikini wax was a reasonable part of the training program even if it can be argued that you could train somebody for the job without doing it.
Exposing your genitals, however, is most assuredly not part of a waxer’s job. This is a rather important distinction! Do you think that the IRS makes new accountants practice auditing by going over their officemates’ tax forms?
They can try to argue that this is a reasonable requirement. Unlike a requirement to wear a company shirt, however, it constitutes a violation of the worker’s rights to not have to show co-workers their nude ano-genital areas. It is therefore unlikely that this argument will pass muster with the court.
I am really not sure why you are having such a tough time with this.
And one obvious counterargument is that being exposed before a roomful of one’s colleagues was not a reasonable part of the training program, that the same benefit would have resulted from a requirement that the trainees receive a private waxing from any salon of their choosing. It’s hard to see how the public nature of the waxing constituted anything but sexual harassment.
And needless to say, if only the female spa workers were required to undergo this part of the training program, it was a discriminatory requirement, and this would detract from the defense of its reasonableness as a requirement as well. If undergoing a waxing was beneficial to learning to be a waxer, it would be beneficial to male and female waxers alike; it could hardly be beneficial to one sex but not the other.
I think the spa has really screwed itself here, unless the facts claimed in the complaint are simply false.
Because nude ano-genital areas are not part of a normal working environment. But they are a routine part of a bikini waxing spa.
Finley, to all appearances, does not consider herself some kind of pervert. She apparently felt she could give a bikini wax to another woman without it being an immoral act. So she should be able to extend the same consideration to others and assume the woman giving her a bikini wax is as professional as she would be.
Agreed. The fact that there were male bikini waxers in the training program and they had a different training requirement is the spa’s biggest vulnerability, both rhetorically and legally.
Quite frankly I was surprised by that. I’m an old guy and the only hair grooming I’ve ever engaged in was from the neck up. But I had just assumed that only women were giving bikini waxes. Do women really go to men to get bikini waxes? Or are men giving male customers bikini waxes? Do men get bikini waxes?
I’m still trying to get used to men wearing earrings.
So if I run a nursing home, do you think it would be cool if I required the nurses who give our residents daily sponge-baths to sponge-bathe each other? You know, to teach them what it’s like to get a good scrub-down in all their stinkiest creases?
If not, why not?
If so, that’s pretty fucked up.
If you ran a nursing home and you had a nurse who said she considers giving somebody a sponge bath to be a sexual act, would you let her give sponge baths to the residents?
Again, she would give bikini waxes to women who provided their uncoerced consent to the act. It is literally impossible for an equivalent act to be made a requirement of her training, because to do so is coercive.
Her objection is not that it is “sexual”. It is that this requirement stands in clear violation to her and her colleagues’ pretty firmly established rights to not be forced to expose their anus and genitals to each other under duress.
Now answer my question: can I order my nurses to swab each other’s cracks?
Your analogy doesn’t quite work. A nursing home hires licensed nurses, who are already trained .
But the spa is hiring new trainees.
A better analogy would be the barber school mentioned earlier.
I often get my hair cut (real cheap!) at the nearby barber school–by trainees with an instructor hovering over me. It’s a little irritating,too. I hear him telling the trainee "hold the scissors this way, press the comb up against your left hand, … that’s right, now hold your first two fingers this way, and cut straight along the edge, but dont take too much at once…it’s better to cut only to here, then move the comb and scissors…etc,etc,etc…
This is for a guy’s haircut-----------------on his head.
Now imagine it for a woman on her…, well, not on her head.
Geez…I’ve never thought about it before, but just how do most waxers get their training? 
Where does this right come from, exactly?
According to the complaint she is a licensed esthetician and already qualified for the position.
Yeah in an at-will employment state employers should be allowed to do anything they like with employees, because morality and ethics are meaningless.
All states are at will, except Montana, and that has statutory exceptions to a discharge.
Yeah to most employers morailty and ethics are meaningless, ergo, laws are in place.
Is that strawman for scaring off birds or only for entertainment?
Uh, from our society’s collective will to prohibit coercive workplace practices, which manifests itself as a body of state and federal statutes outlining what constitutes sexual harassment and invasion of employee privacies?
Was that supposed to be some kind of trick question or…?
Which of those statutes provides for “the worker’s rights to not have to show co-workers their nude ano-genital areas”?
Looking at a layman’s summary of PA worker right statutes, I’d have to pick out this one as particularly relevant.
I’d say that forcing all of your female employees and none of your male employees to wax and be waxed by their colleagues on their genitals and anuses while other employees are made to watch, all under the implicit threat of termination should an employee decline to participate, qualifies as establishment of a hostile environment. Wouldn’t you?