Persuasive Essay On Tattooing In The Workplace

Tattooing In The Workplace Tattoos have been apart of American culture as long as the country itself. People use it to display messages that have deep meaning to them, or simply something that they find pretty. Regardless of why they got the tattoo, they can be fired from whatever job they have because of the art they choose to display on their skin. There are laws protecting one from being fired for their sexuality, gender, and race, but none for having tattoos. An employer can fire their employee without warning, and there is nothing that person could do about it. There need to be laws protecting one’s right to have tattoos within a workplace environment; to stifle one’s right to tattoo their body is to take away their right to freedom of …show more content…
Since there aren’t laws that protect employees for getting fired because of their tattoos, there’s nothing lawyers can do to help their clients. If a company formally writes up a dress code that prohibits things such as tattoos or piercings, workers who try and file lawsuits for unfair termination will get nowhere in a court. Even workers with tattoos saying that they are HIV positive or what allergies they have can be terminated on the spot for having tattoos and will fail to get compensation in court. There are several laws that prohibit employers from firing employees based upon what they look like, however. For instance, you cannot be fired because of age, race, or disability; in spite of this, you can get fired for having ink. One Starbucks employee, Amos, was fired for having tattoos after working at the same Starbucks for the past seven years. He kept them covered the entire time, assuming that he would be fired if they were shown, which he eventually was. Amos then filed a lawsuit, claiming that no one informed him of this apparent rule, and that the female employees who also had tattoos weren’t being fired. Amos filed this lawsuit in 2010, and a jury trial date is still yet to be