- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
cross-posted from: https://rabbitea.rs/post/280182
I think this is appropriate here!
‘I am a self-expressive person and I feel very confident with pink hair so I came up with a solution to keep the job and my hair’
Imagine thinking it’s okay for a corporation has the right to dictate how you look and treat your body.
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.
“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.
She had pink hair when they hired her. If the organization has rules about things like this then the hiring manager is the one at fault.
Mistakes can never be corrected, got it.
Only ones like you!
It is complicated.
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?