Employers
have a right to establish a dress code for employees for many reasons – image,
health and safety etc. When considering a dress code you might think that hard
hats would be appropriate for factory workers, and suited and booted in an
office. But when a Japanese company recently ordered 2,700 staff to get the
same haircut, our eyes widened and mouths dropped.
A Japanese construction firm has requested that men go to the barbers and ask for a ‘short back-and sides do (slightly longer on top) while the women adopt a ‘cute bob’ with a longer fringe that can be swept to one side.
While you gather yourself, it is worth mentioning that the company maintains that these identical hairstyles will reduce power consumption, a key environmental issue in Japan.
It
appears this isn’t the first case of environmental friendly hair loss with a
Japanese City back in 2010 seeking to ban beards at work.
Beards
in the British workplace have even reached the Employment Appeal Tribunal with
the famous case Mohsin Mohmed, a former customer service
assistant at Euston Station, who claimed religious discrimination when he was dismissed for refusing
to trim his beard to a fist's length - four
inches. The appeal tribunal found that he and Virgin had agreed that he trim
his beard to this length and that his treatment was no different from a
non-Muslim employee. The case was dismissed, but does highlight the point about
producing a fair dress code for both men and women and different religious
backgrounds. As always, advice would be to use common sense.
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