I hope her creative resistance doesn’t get incorporated as part of the brand of her workplace.
EDIT: To the downvoters:
Brands have begun to incorporate some imperfections into their marketing. For example the Deutsche Bahn, our german railway company, are sometimes making jokes about how their trains are notoriously late. Are they making their service better? No. Or not noticeably so far. I think McDonalds have also made jokes about their broken soft ice machines and they did not do anything to make them more reliable. According to iFixit, they and the company making the machines have actively fought against a small company that wanted to make a tool to making fixing these machines easier.
So that’s why i hope that our wig-wearing heroine doesn’t just get incorporated into the marketing instead of being allowed to show her pink hair.
McDonalds does it on purpose to give work to the “technicians” that service the machines. They’re bogus simple issues like overfilling that lock the machine down until they use their service tool to clear it. Great doc by Johnny Harris if you have 30min to kill
“We are a great, hip and youthfull place to work: just look at picture of male model with a hipster beard Joe from Accounting”
(Reminds me of how since about first Tech boom, Tech companies would show to the Press and prospective candidates all the amazing facilities they have for employees to relax - fuzzball tables, relax-spaces with beanbag chairs, even indoor slides - but if you’re on the inside you quickly find out you’re expected to work 12h/day on a never ending sequence of death marches and you’ll never actually have time to use those “relax facilities”)
This kind of thing is the result of about the same process as their businesswise evaluation of complying with regulations: they usually conclude that the profit maximizing option is to provide the appearence of complying whilst internally and through less explicit methods (usually all in choices that aren’t explicitly justified) acting in a completelly different way.
If there is one thing companies have learned in the last 4 decades is that image managements is way cheaper (read: “profit enhancing”) than actually doing the right things and delivers pretty much the same results if in influencing those external to the company.
One can trust a corporation about as much as one can trust a known sociopath.
One a sidenote, I never got the point of e.g. xbox rooms and ping pong tables in offices. Why the hell would I want to relax in a place of work? I want to do my work, then go home (to relax). Playing 30 min video games in the afternoon would mean that happens 30 mins later.
Well I can’t. There is no reason you should die your hair unnatural colors. Its harmful for a persons and company credibility and has no place in the work place
dress codes have always been rooted in racism & sexism. there’s absolutely no reason a job should control your hair unless it disrupts business, not for “offending conservatives”
Well, as a customer facing role, they have good reason for the requirement. She is representing this business. They have the right to represent themselves a cartain way.
I’m sure there was a dress code when she signed up for the job. She agreed to it. Instead of realizing how childish she’s acting, she just doubles down and whines on the internet. Really a snapshot of people these days.
fwiw I think pink hair should be perfectly fine but there are some rules with dress that are a good idea. I don’t care if you wear a dress, slacks or have rainbow hair but generally I prefer people I do business with to wear stuff.
Then there’s food safety. Things like hair nets and prohibiting certain jewelry and outfits in food processing plants is another example of when sometimes it’s ok to limit personal expression for the sake of others’. A server though? No such reason. Maybe a hair net if they brought food to your table or were also a chef.
Literally none of the things you listed here count as modifying your body? As a reply to “nobody should have to arbitrarily change their body for their employer,” “sometimes there are practical clothing and equipment requirements” is practically a non-sequitur.
Which is cool, except the subject of this entire thread has nothing to do with modifying body parts so it’s also fair for the responder to be referring to attire rather than actual body modification.
If that was the dress code when I signed up to the job then absolutely, that’s what I signed up for. If they changed the dress code however then I will challenge that.
These expectations are the problem, if I agreed to sell my soul because I didn’t want to read a several page agreement while installing a free program, should they get it? Fuck no. Also, as somebody who’s worked all sorts of different positions: these rules are unenforceable, in a lot of cases. If a business hires you, they will try to keep that asset. A lot of times managers do not care what you wear until you’re someone they don’t like. Especially if you work in food service, and make a standard industry wage (that is, not shit!!) Push that envelope. Your coworkers will too, maybe.
Exactly. Like there can be safety concerns and such, but not to the extent that some places push it. Like my neurologists infusion center doesn’t care about tattoos, piercings, or hair color unless they might get caught on things or are NSFW. So all piercings must be small, smooth, and not hoops. Even gauged ears are fine as long as they have solid plugs. And most people are smart enough to only put NSFW tattoos in easily coverable places. Employers thinking they can just blinding dictate your entire appearance is absurd.
Yes, they actually do. They’re probably conservative dickheads. They know that pink hair is code for “I am a tolerant and kind person; I might be gay but not necessarily; I support counterculture ideas.”
They hate the counterculture ideas. They don’t hate the color pink. Covering it up with a terrible wig makes it about something else.
Or anyway, so they think. What they’ve actually done is given her an opportunity to start conversations about the pink hair.
Hah! It doesn’t even take that. All you need is a middle-management who doesn’t support the rights of their workforce, is inconvenienced should a customer gin up complaints about OP’s hair-color (whatever it is), and is generally just lazy and indifferent, learning from upper mgmt that growth & profits are 99% the things that count, followed by limiting liability situations. The workers themselves are just an inconvenient expense in the equation.
Yeah, the only concern is whether the hair style could cause issues (notably a lot of hair can be an issue in some jobs), and even than you can manage most of the time.
Maybe people with opinions like this are the ones who need to calm the fuck down. Okay little Miss. CryBaby? I have a sneaking suspicion that this comment isn’t the worst of your red flags either.
If playfully poking fun at authority by demonstrating how the intended consequences of petty rules can be subverted creatively irks you, you’re in the wrong community, hun.
“Ms. Extra” spends her own time and money entertaining people while thumbing her nose at those corporate slugs. I think people who make other people happy are probably not throwing a tantrum.
… I can’t tell if you’re serious or not. How is that at all the same thing? He wore a costume to a costume party. This girl wore a costume to her client facing position while working. There’s no universe where this is the same thing.
Donning anti-conformity attire, or a silly loophole around it, is still conformity. That was the point he was barely making in your clip. He should have shown up in his normal clothes. This girl should have just kept her pink hair.
Dude, ew. House is not a role model. Looking at his anti-social assholery is entertaining. But he is not a good or even reasonable person most of the time. He is a high functioning sociopath.
How do you not know that Dr House is the villain in that show? Im this clip his own colleague calls him out for it. This clip clearly shows how biased and judgemental he is without basis. He fucking abuses pills in this scene. THAT'S A CLUE.
Does anyone younger than a boomer even care about hair color? I’m 37 and while pink hair might stand out to me, that’s only because of the rules written by those with sticks up their backsides, half a century ago. Ultimately, I don’t give a damn.
Doing something to playfully point out the silliness of the policy…or she could sue. Seems like she did the less extra of those two options.
I have a friend who was upset he couldn’t wear shorts to the office while women could wear capri pants…he found women’s capri pants in his size and wore them. I guess he’s extra as well?
She’s Ms. Extra because she’s resisting bullying by an incompetent employer?
It’s not wholly unreasonable for a business to have some kind of appearance standard for front-of-house employees. But it is unreasonable to hire people for those positions literally sight unseen, and it’s a stupidly written policy if pink hair violates it while ridiculous wigs do not.
Besides, it’s 2023. Brightly colored hair is hardly an outrageous and rare sight to see. No one is going to stop frequenting a business because they were greeted by someone with pink hair.
No one is going to stop frequenting a business because they were greeted by someone with pink hair.
Some will but you didn’t want them there in the first place, any profit the company makes off their purchase was going to be negated into the red by taking up employee time with stupid requests and complaints.
They don’t have the right to control what you do to your hair. They do have the right to put someone with a more professional look in a client facing front house position.
On one side companies sometimes have policies on the appearance of their client-facing people due to wanting to project the kind of image some customers expects (humans in general are pretty superficial in passing judgement, even when they’re supposed to be hardnosed professionals, so some client representatives will have their judgment - which in the ideal world would be entirelly done on professional grounds - affected by the appearance of the front of the house personnel) rather than because people inside that company actually care about it.
On the other side, this stuff is widelly abused in the highly hierarchical structure which is the typical company to very visibly demonstrate the power of management through making the most visibly free-thinking employees comply (or leave, they don’t care: the purpose is for it to be seen by the rest so as to induce them to “do as they’re told” and even create an environment of peer pressure for compliance, the kind of environment were you have things like for example “a culture of unpaid long-hours”).
Businesses have the right to not be represented by someone with pink hair if they don’t want that to be their image. If I show up at work dressed up like a clown I’m probably gonna get a talking to. I don’t understand what the controversy is.
She had pink hair when they hired her. No one at the company bothered to engage with even a Zoom call to screen her appearance, so they are gonna do what now, exactly?
“More professional looking” has historically been used to justify racism and sexism.
Looking like a professional means looking like the person who knows how to do this job, whatever it is. Professionals come in all sizes, shapes, and colors. If I have a different mental image of “looking like a professional plumber” to “looking like a professional nurse” to “looking like a professional accountant,” that’s my bias and shouldn’t dictate who can be those things. Nor how they can wear their hair except for safety.
It’s not like she’s unclean, or doing her job poorly, or harassing the customers.
We’re not talking about racism. Nobody has pink hair naturally. This individual made a choice to appear a certain way. If that is contrary to the business’s image they are trying to project then they have every right to terminate her or at least put in a back office role, not front house client facing.
Also how does not fall under dress code? Basically the same thing and nobody finds that controversial for the most part.
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