The Arbitrariness And Irrelevance Of Formal Workplace Attire

There are ways that clothing could be regulated in a workplace setting that go beyond something like the sexism of forcing women to cover their bodies to an arbitrary extent.  Indeed, this is not the only arbitrary way employers can force workers to wear or not wear clothes of a specific kind.  The completely random degree of formality in workplace attire expected by so many companies is really rooted in how some people with power subjectively feel at home wearing/seeing some clothing but not other kinds, with that dividing line inevitably being arbitrary to their random feelings or perceptions.  Nothing but the entirely meaningless, invalid allure of traditions and subjective approval is there to stand on for anyone supportive of this norm (with the very rare exception where formal clothing might be an actual necessity, such as if someone's job involves fitting in with other people already wearing formal clothing).  If someone wants to dress formally for any job they have, they can do so simply to do it out of sheer preference, and that is that is not irrational.  Penalizing others for not doing the same or requiring them to is a betrayal of reason and makes someone a slave to an assumption that was likely just prompted by societal traditions or subjective whims.

This also of course provides another pointless barrier to the poor--they might not have the money and time to find the perfect clothing to satisfy the arbitrary whims of corporate leaders, which locks them out of many jobs that could ironically enable them to easily purchase such clothing to begin with.  Many people love to at least pretend to want to help the poor, when measures like this, merely doing away with arbitrary social norms that are irrational to embrace as anything more than the meaningless preferences of certain people and thus are irrational to enforce, would do far more to help the poor find employment more easily than giving them a one-time gift of food or water ever could.  Now, excluding the poor is not at all necessarily the intention behind the very widespread cultural phenomenon of mandating work clothes of arbitrary formality, but this is a consequence either way and the entire tradition is philosophically asinine as it is.

Is the clothing an employee is wearing safe for the job?  Does it have words on it proclaiming some sort of erroneous ideology?  These are the only objectively relevant or significant reasons to forbid very specific types of clothing at all workplaces.  More importantly, there is no logical necessity in the idea that formal clothing is necessary for the vast majority of jobs to be worked, so it is neither a self-evident logical axiom nor something that logically follows from any other necessary truth of reason, nor is there any reason to think there is any moral significance to making a workplace unnecessarily formal other than preferences and assumptions; that is to say, there is no basis whatsoever for even believing that formal clothing is on any level necessary.  Moreover, it is objectively unrelated to workplace efficiency, and this is not grounded in personal experience or hearsay about how some random business ran just as well or better without enforcing more formal attire: it is a logical fact that is true independent of all specific examples and experiences.  People can be productive or unproductive with or without formal clothing.

No study or personal preference as expressed in a person's experience can possibly invalidate a strictly logical truth such as this.  People who already have assumed that this is morally or otherwise required for most businesses might suddenly feel strange to the point of lessening productivity if such norms were to ever be lifted, but they are stupid enough to have made an assumption in the first place and based their chosen reaction around that assumption.  Even if it was true, it would have been an error to believe it without proof, and hearsay, preference, tradition, and consensus are not proofs of anything beyond that hearsay, preference, and so on exists.  Of course, it is conservatives who are most likely to preserve this tradition precisely because conservatism is largely about preventing or slowing change away from how things are or have been, yet the idea that this convention is logically necessary for productivity is false and whatever moral weight conservatives might think this has is just assumed.