emmelinemay | More news

More from the newspapers - from sad to FURIOUS.

Muslim hairdresser who wears a scarf wins £4000 for 'hurt feelings' after being turned down for a job in a super trendy salon

She wouldn't have got that job headscarf or not, quite frankly. It's really near my work, and all the people that work in there are alternative trendy types. So now you're no longer allowed to refuse people jobs if they won't fit in? We can all sue potential employers when we have a bad interview for 'hurt feelings'???

This was nothing to do with discrimination. This is a stupid girl in totally the wrong profession. She was apparently turned down TWENTY FIVE TIMES in total, it was just that this one salon owner was honest enough to mention what all the rest were thinking - how can you be a HAIR STYLIST if you believe your hair should be covered in public??

I am actually incoherent with rage over this issue. I am pretty sure I mentioned it here when the news first broke, but can't find my entry on it.

The tribunal found no religious discrimination, no unfair discrimination, they even accepted thatone of the reasons the head-scarf girl was turned down was that she lived too far away from the salon. And yet, £4000 for HURT FEELINGS???

emperor_tamarin sums up with this comment:
Headline should be: "Self righteous teenager gets payout for belonging to minority religious group that everyone is afraid of offending."

EDIT - Here's the website for Wedge, with some pictures of the stylists.
http://www.wedgehair.co.uk/Pages/Gallery.html
Note - the owner trained at Children Of Vision - some of you will remember their salon upstairs at Kensington Market. This girl would not have got a job there, headscarf or otherwise.

Current Mood: angry

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

jaketherat.livejournal.com

I think the tattoo shop is probably the closest analogy. Not that people would actively avoid getting tattooed by someone without any (although personally I'd be wary), but I reckon there's a compelling case to made that employees are not just required to style hair/tattoo people/take appointments for a hairstylist or tattooist, but also to be a walking advertisement for the quality and style of work their place of business caters to. If you went to a hairdresser or tattooist who had bad hair or tattoos you'd think twice before handing your money over. It's not a great leap from there to say that someone who refuses to display their hair is failing to fulfil a basic condition of their employment.

From:

hotel-noir.livejournal.com

I agree that a good case could be made from that angle, but assuming (I have no stats) there are Muslim women wearing scarves employed successfully in other hairdressers, the onus would be on the establishment to argue why it doesn't fit in with their particular business, and if they cannot do that, if they just make a vague appeal to a company style and “we recon, at a guess, we might lose some unspecified quantity of business” rather than producing business plans, surveys, and cold statistics, then it seems they are involved in indirect discrimination. My gut feeling since the court found that they were guilty of that is not so much “political correctness gone mad” as “you hired a cheap lawyer who didn’t make the case very well”.

The tattoo shop example strikes me as particularly difficult since if the staff are themselves an advertisement of the quality of the establishment, then what of staff tattooed elsewhere? Could you sue them for false advertising if the quality of tattoo the shop produced was significantly below the work on the members of staff? Would they be legally required to mention to anyone who comes in the shop "my tattoos weren't actually done here" for fear of such a claim? What if someone had tattoos that were of an inferior quality, would you be able to turn them away from jobs so as to not be associated with some other tattooists work? - It seems in all these cases that once again if someone was turned down for a job on the basis that they were not tattooed and yet other tattoo parlours function successfully with a member of non-tattooed staff, then the onus falls on the establishment to defend "this is how we work, part of working here is that everyone is an advert for our exceptional quality and style", but then all these other issues of people tattooed in other parlours leap up. If everyone was only tattooed in that parlour and hence was a genuine advert for it then you could probably form a case. If they weren’t (and lets face it, most people will have a few tattoos (probably in the major places too) from long before starting to work in any set parlour) then it would be much trickier. If they aren’t actually an advert for your particular product, then it’s difficult to see that having or not having tattoos from some other parlour would be relevant to your work. [in all of this case I’m assuming admin staff rather than the actual tattooist, whose aesthetics may well be more relevant in trusting yourself to them, though I’d imagine most tattoos on a tattooists are not self-administered]

From:

emmelinemay.livejournal.com

What if someone had tattoos that were of an inferior quality, would you be able to turn them away from jobs so as to not be associated with some other tattooists work

My tattooist probably wouldn't hire anyone with shit tattoos for this exact reason.

In jobs like that, the satff themselves are an advert for their services. Ditto a really really posh high end fashion business, they would want someone who looks exactly the part. It's perfectly fine for employers to advertise for someone 'well presented', meaning looks good and smart in a suit, no visible piercings or tattoos. I simply wouldn't apply for those jobs for two reasons.

1 - I woulnd't get it. I am not 'well presented' in that way
2 - I wouldn't like it. I wouldn't be a good 'personality fit' for them.

Why on earth a girl that looks the way the muslim girl looks (clothes and makeup alone, lets leave aside the headscarf) would want to work somewhere where the sylists look the way they look (fishnet tights, low cut dresses, loads of tattoos) is beyond me.

Maybe image *shouldn't* matter, but there are some industries in which is *does*.

Maybe that dishwasher would feel completely left out if he/she didn't speak italian, maybe the waiters speak in italian all the time. Maybe they would prefer someone who is italian, so that person wouldn't feel left out.

Regardless of the muslim girls 'hurt feelings' - the 25 hairdressers that turned the girl down previously all clearly had their reasons too. This one salon owner is merely a scapegoat.

From:

hotel-noir.livejournal.com

If someone with a skin condition that meant they were allergic to tattoo ink was turned down for a reception job at a parlour where they were perfectly talented enough to carry out all of the practical aspects of the job and the ONLY reason they were turned down was due to them being untattooed, then they would have a valid case for discrimination on the basis that while most other tattoo shop staff may be tattooed, they are not necessarily tattooed in that particular establishment and therefore their tattoos do not directly refer to the business that goes on there. If you wrote specifically into the contract that part of this job is being a model for the company then you could probably turn them away, but to carry that policy though you would really need to turn away people who had tattoos from other parlours. If you didn't allow the untattooed but did allow people with tattoos from elsewhere, then you can only justify that on the basis that "we have a look", which strikes me as too vague to realistically defend in court, just as in the gay bookshop example above.

I agree that chances are this girl went to a bunch of 'nice' hairdressers who were smart enough to not ask about the headscarf and merely turned her away, she eventually ended up applying at somewhere she'd probably never normally have applied at out of desperation, somewhere she'd probably have hated working at, and the direct speech of that establishment has opened them to a claim, and that could be seen as an issue of being made a scapegoat or of just them being really rubbish at the politics of HR.

With regard to the dishwasher, if they turned down the application of a non-Italian dishwasher simply on the grounds of nationality it would be discrimination - that they might not enjoy the job, might be left out of conversations, etc. is totally irrelevant provided they could do the job. There is no law that says you have to be nice to minorities, merely that you shouldn't discriminate if someone can carry out the function.

From:

emmelinemay.livejournal.com

You can reject someone on the ground that they are not a good 'fit' for the organisation though, can't you?

And re. the skin condition - WHY would you want to be a tattooist if you are allergic to tattoo ink? Why did this girl want a job in a trendy hair salon when she won't show off her own haircut? Why would someone who can't speak a word of italian want to work in an italian speaking environment?

It just to me seems like she just kept going until she found one she felt she could sue, to be honest.

From:

hotel-noir.livejournal.com

Lets put it this way, what if a successful hairdresser got cancer, went on chemotherapy, and all their hair fell out - would it be perfectly ok for the salon to fire them on the basis that they were no longer representing the latest styles? If a tattoo receptionist was involved in a horrific fire and all their skin was now so burnt that they could not show most of the skin on their body, would it be ok to fire them? If it isn't ok to fire people in these circumstances, it isn't really ok to not hire them either. If you are willing to hire a girl with cancer and no hair, then why not a girl with a head-scalf.

Fitting the organisation is a difficult field. There is this notion of "looking polite" that is required for example in a posh restaurant that allows them to not hire someone with piercings, but it doesn't allow you to not hire a Sikh. If I thought black people didn't 'fit' my organisation that would obviously be direct discrimination, but if I thought only someone with a certain type of hair-cut would 'fit' my organisation and a certain minority wasn't allowed that hair-cut, it seems to me that is still a case of discrimination, even if indirect, and that strikes me as quite right if they can do the job perfectly well and you are only applying some vague notion of "that's how we do things around here, we might lose business otherwise, but we have no solid evidence to back that up". With evidence they'd have been fine, but with a mere notion that some people might not like it it was discriminatory.

It would be fine for a Swedish travel office to only hire Swedish staff who know the country intimately and speak the language, but if they had a policy that they only hired white, blonde Swedish staff because that is the brand of Sweden they want to portray that would be wrong, since there may be a ethnically Japanese but nationally second generation Swedish person who is perfectly suitable for the job. It seems to me we need to defend that? In which case the issue is the boundaries of a hair-dressers job, and I would say they don't by default include representing the salon as a model, otherwise the hairdresser with cancer could be justifiably fired which seems wrong to me at least.