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[emmelinemay]

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.

Comments

[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.