this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023

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Malicious Compliance

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[REPOST] Woman says she started wearing ‘terrible wigs’ after work banned her pink hair (www.thelondoneconomic.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

85 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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’

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[–] [email protected] 177 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 58 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

Yeah, the marketing version of "inclusiveness":

"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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 99 points 11 months ago

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"

[–] [email protected] 96 points 11 months ago (2 children)

"They think this is better?"

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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago

What they’ve actually done is given her an opportunity to start conversations about the pink hair.

Keen insight. I wouldn't have known she exists otherwise.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

They’re probably conservative dickheads.

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.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 11 months ago

Capitolist have controlled out bodies for far too long.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Can she wear a pink wig?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago

Probably not, in a previous job my hair (wig or real) had to be a "natural" colour.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago (1 children)

landed a front-of-house role in the hospitality industry without a face-to-face or video interview

Seems like the flawed interviewing process is to blame.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yes, so they could discriminate her based on her looks sooner?

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago

Terrible?

This woman has great taste in wigs. I dig them.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

Damn XD.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

You better believe those quotes, cause those wigs are fantastic

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