Oh, the harsh reality of the workplace. In the age of clicktivism, when anyone can launch a bogus Change.org petition, one undergraduate student was shocked to find out you can’t petition your way out of every uncomfortable situation.
An anonymous 20-something took to Ask a Manager (an advice blog) to complain that he was fired from his internship for protesting the company’s dress code and ask for guidance on being reinstated. In the post, he explains he felt “ the dress code was overly strict” but “wasn’t going to say anything” until he noticed that one of the actual workers — not an intern — wore shoes that were contrary to the dress code.
Injustice! Someone calls the Bias police, quick!
Triggered, he (it appears the letter writer is a he) decided the most logical thing to do in this situation was to start a petition requesting that the dress code be relaxed, and get all the other interns to sign it:
We decided to write a proposal stating why we should be allowed some leeway under the dress code. We accompanied the proposal with a petition, signed by all of the interns (except for one who declined to sign it) and gave it to our managers to consider.
Our proposal requested that we also be allowed to wear running shoes and non leather flats, as well as sandals (not flip-flops though) and other non-dress shoes that would fit under a more business casual dress code.
Unsurprisingly, management was unimpressed and called the rebellious interns in for a meeting before letting them go. “We were shocked ” he continues, because “the proposal was written professionally like examples I have learned about in school, and our arguments were thought out and well-reasoned.”
Ah but see, that’s the problem, dear. These days, we’re taught that if you don’t like a institutional policy, you should organize a sit-in, start a petition, and sob until the administration caves in to your demands. But that’s not how professionals negotiate and handle disputes in the workplace.
As the advice blogger Alison Greene pointed out, it’s like being in a guest in somebody’s house and presenting your host with a signed petition to change their rules about cleaning, because who wants to wash dishes, right?
And the worker who dared breaching the rules? Tuns out she was a former solider who’d lost her leg in combat, and was therefore allowed to wear whatever shoes she liked.
That’s not to say interns should suck it up or that they do not have the right to be treated respectfully. But it is not best practice to stand up to your managers when your opinion is not sought — particularly when the whole point of you being there is to learn.
Inquiring about what sounds like a pretty reasonable dress code, rather than assuming she/he knew better, might have saved his internship.
