Singer Susan Boyle recently found herself in hot water when she had an outburst at a restaurant in London. Reportedly, Susan snapped and shouted at one of the employees of the restaurant. However, it turns out Susan had someone else as the target of her ire - her assistant, who apparently told Susan that she needed to go on a diet and lose some weight. Um, not cool, assistant. I’m struggling to find a reason why anyone would tell their boss to go on a diet - even if you think that, why would you ever say it to the person who has the authority to fire you? Most celebrity assistant jobs involve being a bit of a yes man or yes woman, and I find it incredibly surprising that an assistant would ever tell their celebrity boss “you need to lose weight.” Entertainment Lawyer, as usual, has a pretty good theory - that the assistant was passing along a message from a manager or agent or someone else who wanted to pressure Susan about her looks. Sadly, it’s not at all uncommon for the people responsible for managing a famous person’s career to give the celebrity unsolicited ‘advice’ about how to dress/look, even to the point where they encourage them to diet.
That said, Susan apologized for her outburst, and let’s hope this is the last we hear of it.
In my many office experiences, I’ve done everything from group yoga classes to company-wide ropes courses, all in the name of “bonding” or “boosting morale.” As lame as both those things were, they were the company’s idea and not something mandated by the government. Now, though, there is a new law in Japan regulating how much people can weigh and how big their waists can be. Additionally, companies are expected to keep their employees slim - and fire the ones who don’t make the cut.
Under Japan’s health care coverage, companies administer check-ups to employees once a year. Those who fail to meet the waistline requirement must undergo counseling. If companies do not reduce the number of overweight employees by 10 percent by 2012 and 25 percent by 2015, they could be required to pay more money into a health care program for the elderly. An estimated 56 million Japanese will have their waists measured this year.
Perhaps more astounding, even before Japanese lawmakers set the waistline limits last year, the International Diabetes Federation (IDF) amended its recommended guidelines for the Japanese. The new IDF standard is 90 centimeters (35.4 inches) for men and 80 centimeters (31.5 inches) for women. But the Japanese government has yet to modify its limits.
If they tried to pull this shit in America, I feel like people would riot. My obsession with sour straws should be no one’s issue but mine.
A high rate of unemployment and a low rate of new hires tends to result in people becoming increasingly competitive and desperate to find a new job. It’s one thing to become really proactive and apply for every job in sight, even if it isn’t in your field or might be a step down from what you were doing before, because you need to have a regular income. But it’s another thing to spend money in order to try and land a job. One “expert” believes that plastic surgery is on the rise, despite the challenging economic times, as people try to look better in order to stand out from the competition:
The American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery reports that, among last year’s most prominent trends, about two thirds of its members reported seeing men and women who requested cosmetic surgery because they wanted to remain competitive in the workplace.
“In the corporate world, there’s a lot of emphasis on image, and image goes with self-confidence,” says Antonio Armani, a Beverly Hills, California, cosmetic surgeon who specializes in hair transplants. “I think a lot of people do invest money in improving their looks because they feel this is one way they can go up the corporate ladder.”
Such procedures included breast implants, tummy tucks, teeth whitening, and hair transplants (coincidentally, all the exact procedures that Jon and Kate Gosselin got!).
Maybe some people ascribe to the “you have to spend money to make money” philosophy, but I can’t get on board with this. Sure, ageism exists, but I wish we as a culture would spend more time combatting the origins of ageism than going along with it and mutilating our bodies in order to conform to some arbitrary standard of youth and attractiveness.
As I’ve said before, women have it way harder than men when it comes to appropriate office dressing, especially in the summer. In addition to figuring out hemline length and strap thickness, there’s one more element to summertime business casual: cleavage.
If you’re on the flatter side, like me, it’s a lot easier to get away with wearing lower cut tops at work, since it’s incredibly unlikely you’ll have anything to expose. But if you’ve been blessed with a fuller figure, you have to be extra careful about what you wear. It’s sad but true - even though you didn’t ask for your boobs or ask everyone to base their opinions of you on said boobs, they will. People will talk to your breasts instead of your face and, at work, when you’re doing everything you can to be taken seriously, a button coming loose at an inopportune moment could be the kiss of death. Depending what industry you’re in, cleavage can go either way - I’ve known women who work at restaurants and get better tips if they show more skin, as well as women in fashion who hide their breasts when the gamine look is back in style.
Based on my own entirely unscientific survey, cleavage was fine if you had a male boss and totally verboten if you had a female one. Do any of you have such stories to report about your own boobs or someone else’s in the office?
If you work as an Alabama state employee, and you’re obese, be prepared to face what some are calling a “fat tax.” As of January 2011, state employees who are classified as obese (this will involve testing body mass index and other bodily indicators of being overweight) will have to pay an additional $25 a month in health care. Obesity puts people at higher risk for health problems from diabetes to high blood pressure, and the state feels that those people should have to pay more in insurance to offset the fact they will be using additional medical services. Alabama is second only to Mississippi in the percentage of its citizens (about 30) who are medically obese. The state already charges a $25 health care tax to smokers. (I have no idea how they get you to admit this, by the way.) Because the law won’t take effect for another two and a half years, the government is providing incentive for workers to slim down by offering discounted gym memberships, in-office Weight Watchers classes, and other programs.
What do you think of the “fat tax”? Is it fair to say that people who use more medical services should have to proportionally pay more for them? Or is this an example of weight discrimination at work? Let me know what you think (please note, I almost made it out of here without a “weigh in” joke). Also, does this make anyone else think of that Simpsons episode where Homer gains enough weight to get on disability and work from home and then he wears the muumuu? That might actually be my favorite episode.