Tattooing, piercing seldom in company dress codes

One of the customers’ favorite cashiers at Ideal Market has tattoos all over his arms. A couple of workers at Lexmark International wear nose rings. A male computer programmer at Storage Technology Corp. sports a discreet hoop in one earlobe.

Tattooing and piercing, while almost de rigeur at colleges and high schools around the country, now are making their way into the corporate world. But a random survey of several Boulder County businesses shows that few companies find it necessary to institute a policy on employees’ choices of where — and what — they want pierced and tattooed.

“It’s just not come up as being an issue,” says Joyce McKee in Lexmark’s human resources department. Longmont’s Lexmark, which employs more than 300 people in jobs ranging from engineering to assembly, has a “business casual” dress code. McKee says that as long as tattooing or piercing is “not a safety issue and doesn’t affect a person’s performance, it won’t come up” in dress code discussions.

Similarly, Boulder’s Exabyte Corp. has no piercing or tattooing policy, nor does Storage Technology or Celestial Seasonings.

At the University of Colorado, spokeswoman Tyra Shafer says each department sets its own policy on piercing and tattooing, and there are no universitywide regulations either for or against body decor.

Generally, companies don’t worry about employees’ choice of body ornamentation because pierced or tattooed workers get few customer complaints. But one Boulder business decided its workers’ freedom of expression should override customers’ freaked-out sensibilities.

Moe’s Broadway Bagel employees generally aren’t reticent when it comes to tattooing and piercing. Marketing Manager Steve Sheldon says some customers used to be bothered by nose-ringed sandwich makers, but the restaurant decided to stand by its policy of self-expression for all workers.

“I never really thought of it (piercing and tattooing) as a huge deal, but some people thought it was unsanitary or something,” Sheldon says. “But now there’s so much piercing in Boulder, people are growing accustomed to it.

“It’s not like it’s a violation of the health code,” Sheldon continues. “It’s almost a freedom of speech issue.”

Human Resources Manager Mary Shippy of Boulder’s Ideal Market learned that to her detriment three and a half years ago.

That’s when the market, in response to customers unused to pierced and tattooed food servers, decided to institute a policy about how many piercings and tattoos were acceptable. Employees and customers picketed the store in response.

Ideal backed down, Shippy says.

“We realized it’s a fairly liberal community in Boulder,” she says. “We decided not to take a stand and make this a huge issue.”

Now, she says, the only reference to tattoos or piercing in the employee handbook is the following statement about jewelry: “Visible jewelry must be small and tasteful as determined by management. Jewelry must not interfere with job performance.”

Shippy says there have been some customer complaints about employee body decorations, but in two years, she’s never confronted an employee about piercings. As long as an employee’s piercings or tattoos don’t affect his or her job performance, then Ideal has no problem, she says.

Had Ideal Market or some other company instituted a strict dress code (or in some cases, un-dress codes) it still would not be violating any federal law, says Rebecca Fischer, an attorney with Boulder’s Chrisman Bynum & Johnson law firm.

Dress codes are left up to the discretion of a private employer, Fischer says, but if the policy infringes on the rights of protected groups — women, minorities, people of different religions — then there can be trouble.

For instance, some people of the Sikh religion have long hair piled on top of their heads, and any dress code requiring them to wear their hair in a different way could be an infringement of their rights, Fischer says.

In the case of body decoration, “I’m not sure that a no-tattoo rule wouldn’t impact women and minorities only,” Fischer says. So far, it hasn’t been put to the test. Fischer says the only case she could find involving tattoos in the workplace was in California last summer, when a worker had “HIV positive” tattooed on his body.

The employer asked the worker to cover up the tattoo because it was upsetting patients at the health-care facility where he worked, but the man refused, saying the request violated his First Amendment rights. Fischer says the employer won the case by showing that the tattoo was disruptive to the workplace.

“Typically, in cases like these, the interest of the employer will win out,” she says. Employers have a right to ask their workers to maintain a professional appearance, she adds.

When advising employers on dress codes, Fischer recommends the code not be so specific that it limits things like tattoos and piercings. But as body art becomes more popular, she believes there may come a time when companies will have to institute a “blanket policy” about piercings and tattoos.

“There’s no woman in my office under the age of 30 who doesn’t have something pierced,” Fischer says. “It’s becoming very common.”