new thread
Check this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/nottinghamshire/4970628.stm
Doesn't look good really...
The view of one Tribunal is NOT binding upon any other. he should take it to the Employment Appeal Tribunal which can consider the law properly and consider other options such as the dreaded Human Rights Act etc.
I believe that article is about two years old. It hit this board long ago. :-) I wouldn't worry. :-)
Yeah I remember it too, nesides we don't have any Law on our side of the pond defending our right to longhair. We live in the land of the free after all. :-)
Kevin
At least we can choose where to work. :-) I will probably stay with public service jobs as they tend to be more down to earth. I love my current job. Both the environment, and the job itself are great!
all employers decided to enact such a law?
where would we seek employment if every employer required short hair on Male employees?
I agree with the poster who said the guy looked businesslike.
I've seen some Men with ponytails wearing suits.
I like suits myself, but I don't like the idea of someone telling me my hair should be short.
I think Men should be accorded the same hair rights as women in the workplace.
can you imagine employers informing women that they're going to have to cut their long hair off?
Uhhh, yeah I can! I used to work on oil rigs in the Gulf, and one particular company I worked for, required that ALL employees will wear short hair, PERIOD. We didn't have alot of women out there of course, but the couple we had, DID have to cut their hair for employment. It was in the company policies, employee handbooks, etc., when the company first started, so they couldn't run to their lawyers and hide behind their "freedom of expression" shield to get a job, or use it as an excuse to get a lump of money from the company in a frivalous lawsuit.
I'm all for equal rights and such, but what about the rights of the employer? Do we throw his rights out the window, and disregard HIS constitutional rights? I think that a company has EVERY right to decide how it's employees should look, including allowing women to wear long hair, while men wear short. You might think the employer is trying to force his ideals on someone by "making" them change their appearance. He's not MAKING anyone do ANYTHING. But have you ever considered that he may very well think the same of you, by telling him that he MUST allow you to keep whatever appearance you see fit, because you are "expressing" yourself? Are YOUR beliefs more "valid" than his?
Yes, your beliefs are more valid than your employer's where they concern control of your body, because it belongs to you. If it didn't belong to you but belonged to your employer, then you would be a slave and your employer would be your owner. It really is that simple. But for all I know you could be pro-slavery?
OTOH, if your employer thinks you should wear a clown suit and a red nose on a piece of elastic at work, that falls within their domain to control.
That is my personal line in the sand. The law may say otherwise in most places, but if the law is an ass it wouldn't be the first time, LOL!
No beliefs are more valid than anybody elses (mostly because belief, by definition is a) subjective and b) in the absense of knowledge). You do not believe in what you know after all. I do not believe that gravity exists, I know it does. The only validity an idea can carry is the extent to which it can be objectively derived. Certain rights can be objectively derived. Other rights are fantasies, and mostly these "positive" rights require the violation of certain objectively derived rights, thus rendering them unethical. E.g. the positive right to shelter implies the violation of other people's rights to their labour and private property through expropriation, and is thus unethical.
This argument is moot and a strawman since this sort of employment is voluntary. Only when employment is involuntary does slavery occur. If you can choose your employer, or work for yourself, then there is no slavery involved. It is up to the contract you sign with the employer to determine what happens. If you dislike the contract, do not sign it. If the employer later violates the contract, sue them. In this particular case, no contract was violated.
Once again, their domain of contral must be outlined in the contract you sign when you accept the job, not something you subjectively decided was right or wrong, such as the difference between hair and clown suits.
Actually, the law agrees with your line of thinking most of the time. I've already given examples of the "no smoking" laws. Not only does the government disallow smoking on private businesses, but they now plan to do so in homes to in some countries. Besides, many of the civil rights acts disallow discrimination on private businesses too.
This does not make these laws legitimate. There is a great different between legality and morality. Since the government must by definition be immoral (the social contract can be obectively proved to be immoral), at least some of its laws must always be immoral. Besides, every year hundreds of new laws are passed, and there's a great quote that says "More laws, less justice".
Belief may be the wrong word. Opinion is a better fit for what we are actually discussing. IOW, where you are talking about things that affect your appearance on a semi-permanent basis (hair length), your opinion is the most important one. For things that affect you only when you are at work (the clown suit), the boss's opinion is more important.
The slavery discussion simply meant that you own your body unless you are actually a slave, and it ill behooves anyone else to act as if they own you, even or perhaps especially if they do.
You are clearly a libertarian, whereas I am a liberal with anarchist tendencies, and that's quite different.
The major problem with contract theory, and even contract law, is that it assumes equal bargaining power on both sides, which seldom exists in real life, although it can if you have a trade union. Libertarians like yourself seem to believe in contract but not in unions, even though employment contracts are usually one-sided shams unless the employee is either very highly qualified or belongs to a union.
This is the reason that there are employment laws, although imperfect ones, simply in recognition that it is in most cases an illusion that employment contracts are freely chosen. Try handing a prospective employer an employment contract drafted by you instead of him, and see if he can keep a straight face! Most employees lack even enough bargaining power to alter a single line of their contract in reality.
I'm a free market anarchist, not a vulgar libertarian (such as Ron Paul for example). Self-ownership, applied consistently, must inevitably lead to the disollution of all coercion, and thus the abolishment of the state. Hence, you cannot support coercive labour laws lest you contradict your stance on self-ownership.
By the way, what exactly is a liberal anarchist? From my experience with liberals, they are all statists, as are conservatives.
I am not against unions, I am against coercion. The fact that most unions today are empowered by government violence doesn't mean I'm against a theoretically non-coercive union, which would exist if employees have sufficient incentives to create and participate in it. As for worker qualification, the government is to blame here as well. The government creates a situation by which people are not allowed to earn work experience until a certain age, for example. Or they create mandatory education that is often obfuscated indoctrination yielding no benefits for the child's later "real" life.
They do not alter their own contract, rather they choose from a free-market of different contracts. Astute employers would modify their contracts to maximise their labour pool. Alternatively, start your own business.
You must remember here that I am against the current situation, I am not defending it. I am defending a hypothetical situation, and so you can't point to the flaws created by governments and coercion, and then say the free market hence does not resolve these problems. This is called a strawman. I get it all the time. It stems from the somewhat strange belief that what we have today in any way resembles a "free" market.
A couple of points about my political views.
Firstly, there is an online test where you can place yourself on a 'political compass' by answering questions, and it puts me on the liberal left, with a similar score to Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama.
Take the test:-
http://www.politicalcompass.org/
Secondly, the word liberal has different meanings depending on where you are. Here in the US it can mean someone who is in favour of government control, but that isn't a correct definition, and it doesn't mean that in my native England.
Interesting, I'm taking the test now, but I don't like some of the questions. For example: "controlling inflation is more important than controlling unemployment." is a stupid question if you think that neither should be "controlled" (mostly because the fed and gov. causes both). How exactly does one answer that?
"because corporations cannot be trusted to voluntarily protect the environment, they require regulation." - Again, this poses a false dichotomy. As if either you're going to coerce the corporations, or hope for their good will. The mechanism of consumer demand can work this problem out without forcing anyone to do anything.
"the rich are too highly taxed." I think there should be no taxes, period. If I answer "yes" they are, then I'll probably be thrown on the right side, and yet I think the poor and middle class should be taxed less too (none at all in fact).
"governments should penalise businesses that mislead the public." Another false dichotomy. Fraud SHOULD be penalised, but by the free market and arbiters and courts unaffiliated with the government. Medieval ireland had a society of courts independant of any government for 400 years or so, and from what I read it worked quite well.
"an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." This is not for me, but for courts to decide. How could I answer such a question? If I am not a third party, I will obviously be biased. On the other hand, I'm not qualified enough to judge as a third party either. In some cases this may apply, in others it may not.
"schools should not make classroom attendance compulsory." The schools do not make it mandatory, the government does.
"multinational companies are unethically exploiting the plant genetic resources of developing countries." Should be phrased as "Governments have created, subsidised, and continuously bailed out and protected from competition multinational corporations, and are thus the root of the problem."
Anyway, I scored a bottom middle with a little to the right. 3.75 across and -6 down. I should be down at the very bottom though, i'm not really sure where I am on the left/right axis.
wow. personally i find ponytail equipped with suit and tie more buisness like then any dude with slicked back hair :\
how doesnt that man look professional?
discriminative bastards!
companies have the right to set appearance standards. go find another job.
and they told this guy it as a condition of the job!! that's not discrimination.
if he was hired and then told, well that's another thing.
And it would be alright to take woman with long hair but not a man?
absolutely! so long as she was within the company's guidelines. we're talking about AT WILL employment here. im not trying to argue, im just saying this guy has no leg to stand on what-so-ever since the hair policy was disclosed in the interview.
Simply declaring a policy at interview does not necessarily make it legal under British law if the principle underlying it has itself been declared illegal.
ummm...?
'At will' employment doesn't even exist in all 50 states, and we weren't even talking about the US!
are you kidding me? of course it does. it exists in ALL states.
and i know we weren't talking about the US, however the guy in the article was applying at will.
While technically this is true, in the present situation, our options are severly strained. As I have discussed, government intervention has caused an unnaturally large pool of labour, which has obvious bad consequences for employees.
well it's literal to me. but we are beating a dead horse so i'll stop.
Absolutely. so long as its within the company guidelines.
I agree. I think companies should have the right to hire whoever they want.
Yeh, it's called private property. It's their business, so they can discriminate. You can disagree, as do I, but you have no right to try to impose some sort of government law. Private property is already not respected by governments (no smoking in pubs, workplace, etc. laws are all illegitimate violations of private property).
Remember, if you don't have the right to violate others' private property, then you can't pass on that right to governments :)
And yet you would give the employer the right to infringe on the employee's private property in the form of their body? That is the sort of unclear thinking we have seen from the right wing as of late.
Unclear thinking? And for the record, last I checked Agorism was left wing.
There is no infringement because my employment with the employer is purely voluntary. I choose to seek a job with a particular business, and in working for them, we come to a mutual agreement. If they set a dress code that I dislike, then I simply do not sign the contract, and find another employer.
If this were say, the government of North Korea or Saudi Arabia coming to my house and telling me to cut my hair, that would be a very different story, and this is where coercion becomes involved. This is where rights are violated.
Rights to me, are not positive. Rights are negative. I have the right to self-ownership, and can do what I want unless this infringes on somebody else's rights of self-ownership. In other words I cannot initiate violence. Moreover, rights to me are held by individuals, not groups of people (such as civil rights, which is a collectivist conception).
Positive rights are what you see politicians advocating. The right to have food is a positive right since it forms an obligation for others to provide you with food if you are not able to do so yourself (rather than have charity working). Thus, positive rights become inconsistent and unequal, since some people will be expropriating the property of others in order to provide for themselves. Then you have to resolve the ethical contradiction of allowing some people to steal, and others not to steal. This cognitive dissonance is called government, but that's another story.... :P
See the link below please.
See my other post below. The fallacy is in assuming that employment contracts are mutually and entirely voluntarily entered into, when in reality most are lop-sided things that the employer drafts and the employee merely signs.
To make matters worse, some of the lawyers that draft them see it as an ethical obligation to draft them in such a way as to maximise the rights of their client and to correspondingly minimise the rights of those he or she employs, simply so they can't be accused of not representing their client zealously, or else they at least find it safer to follow that course in the absence of instructions to write anything fairer. Believe me, I understand legal 'ethics', which differ a lot from what most people consider ethical. I am a patent agent bound by much the same rules, although they are capable of more than one interpretation.
As I've said, I have no problem correcting this lop-sidedness with unions, up until the moment the initiate aggression and violate property rights. The current terrible employment situation has been created by statism.
And in a free market, with a huge amount of competition and labour scarcity, such firms (and such lawyers) would quickly be outcompeted in all fields except those where the customers demand a particular dress code.
Here's another idea. You seem to think that employers boss around employees, and that employers are in some sort of "control". They're not, customers are. If labour discrimination leads to higher prices, customers may very well choose a store hiring a longhaired man if they sell cheaper (or have a higher quality). And you know who customers are? Other employees! There is no hierarchy, merely a circle. But most importantly, in the absense of draconian legislation, signing contracts would be completely voluntary.
As I said below, I am not defending the current situation. I think discrimination is wrong, but not in any moral or ethical sense. I just think it's unreasonable, ignorant, stupid, etc. Rather, we differ on our solutions. Labour laws and suing employers is a coercion-based solution. Mine is ethically consistent, and promotes freedom.
"The firm successfully argued that they required a conventional and business-like appearance from both male and female workers."
The key word is "conventional" here, otherwise I'd argue against what is considered "business-like appearance".
--
Splat
At least that's in the UK, not in the US. I disagree with this anyway.
Regardless
It seems it's pretty much down to how narrow minded the employer is; I have heard of companies telling people to shave their beards off because "customers find them intimidating". Oh yeah? Proof demanded, please!!!
Steve B
P.S. Pic attached of me at work. Make the most of it. :D
A company is in business to make money.
The clients of the company dictate the standards by their decisions to purchase or not purchase goods.
If you are dealing with a conservative client group, the company will require you to meet what they call standard business dress and grooming for the industry.
For years I was in sales dealing with engineers and chemists in the petrochemical industry. Having long hair would have jeopardized those sales, and consequently my income. Having a beard would have negated my even getting in, as beards are addressed as a safety issue where chemical vapors may be present and a tight air seal may need to be made on an air mask or respirator.
It is somewhat naive to expect a company to risk their sales to accommodate someone who was informed of the standards before being accepted for the position.
Life is a series of value judgments. You make yours, others make theirs. Do I want or plan to cut my hair? No. Would I if I was offered a position which guaranteed my kids' college educations be covered and presented me with financial stability for the rest of my life and be able to pass it down to them. Sure I would.
Each of us has to define our priority list.
Descrimination on the grounds of race? Don't get me wrong I have no problem with different races but if that guy had turned up with some item of clothing as worn by certain races nothing would have been said. If he'd been able to go to a tribunal on the grounds of race there's no question he would have won - so what makes hair length any different.
If it had been me I'd have either shrugged it off and walked out or, if cutting my hair they would have to pay me 24 hours a day, 7 days a week because I can't just go back to having long hair at the end of the work day.
.
Wow it I actually live there in Nottinghamshire itself Cheers Rainmaker for the url :-) Axel
Thanks for showing us that and I see it was a couple of years ago and it's only one case. From what I know of the employment market over here in the UK it's not that bad and most people get jobs on their merit. I'm sure it's an isolated case and well just do't work for a company like that.
As know have many hairy people that have good jobs here in IT and many other areas and always good to keep positive. Mind you if you wanted to HRH Army, Navy or Air Force I don't think longhair has got there yet!
Cheers,
John.B