Justifying Fat Discrimination In The Workplace
In the comments, Liv pointed me to this article, which asks, “Is Fatism the New Racism?” Leaving aside all the implications of equating those two very different issues, the article’s point is to ask whether discrimination against the obese should be protected by law.
The study shows that overweight women are twice as vulnerable as men, and discrimination strikes much earlier in their lives… The author of the study alleges that our culture has made it clear that judging someone based on race or culture is wrong, but the same societal pressure is missing for the differently sized. She says,
“we live in a culture where we obviously place a premium on fitness, and fitness has come to symbolize very important values in our culture, like hard work and discipline and ambition. Unfortunately, if a person is not thin, or is overweight or obese, then they must lack self-discipline, have poor willpower, etc., and as a result they get blamed and stigmatized.”
The main reason for this is the belief that a person has control over their size, which isn’t always true given factors like genetics and economics.
The interesting part to me is the poll, which asks if the law should protect the overweight from discrimination. Currently, “no” is winning by 64%, with comments like:
its a reality in my office that there are morbidly obese women who call in sick all the time and they frequently cannot perform the duties they were hired for.
It is wrong to discriminate, but if the person is frequently ill, and cost the company money, or cannot fulfill their obligations to their job, then a company should not be forced to keep them around to spare them their feelings.
I totally disagree with the idea that if you are obese you should be classified as handicapped. How about taking care of yourself, diet & exercise? If you are truly disabled that’s one thing, but being obese and carrying around a hanicapped placard while you walk into Home Town Buffet is wrong.
There are some people in the comments who are more sympathetic, and even people pointing out some of the logical fallacies in people’s anti-fat arguments. Still, it’s a little window into how people really feel about discrimination against people of size in the workplace: that it makes sense.
Posted by mo pie
Filed under: Advocacy, Fatism, Race & Ethnicity, Work
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As a fat black man living in the South I think that the two can go hand in hand in the workplace when it comes to discrimination.
It is sad that discrimination of any kind would be allowed in anyway. This is just another example of how jaded the thought process of a large number of individuals in the US is.
Sorry, I don’t have anything intelligent to say. I’m just so saddened by this.
This is so depressing.
Considering how hiring practices seem to be so freely discriminatory against fat people, it doesn’t surprise me. I have a co-worker who lives on Lean Cuisine meals and I can almost FEEL her disapproving gaze as I heat up something that has cheese on it! Or, *gasp*, eat a cookie. When I first started here and I was assisting her with a board meeting setup, she told me that I should leave a few minutes earlier than she did, because “I’m a lot faster than you are, Heidi.”
Since she’d never had any reason to see how quickly I walk (I’m clumsy and careful to walk slowly in the office), I’m not quite sure what she’d based that assessment on, other than simply judging my weight.
Maybe some of those commenters are doing the same kind of judging about their obese co-workers (instead of “she doesn’t want to lift that fifty pound box because it’s damn heavy” it’s “she doesn’t want to lift that box because she’s fat and lazy!”)
It is wrong to discriminate, but if the person is frequently ill, and cost the company money, or cannot fulfill their obligations to their job, then a company should not be forced to keep them around to spare them their feelings.
Huh. You know, you could almost think this person MISSED THE ENTIRE POINT. You don’t avoid being a bigot because it hurts feelings, you avoid being a bigot because bigotry is wrong.
Huh. I’m a “morbidly obese” woman. I’ve missed a total of 2-3 days of work (9 years on the job) due to the flu. Unless obesity causes the flu now.
I work in the medial field. I’ve written plenty of “sick day” notes and have filled out pages of FMLA forms for “normal” and “thin” people.
I’m the ONLY person in the office that can lift anything heavy. Everybody else is disabled – and not ONE of my co-workers is anywhere near “obese.”
It infuriates me to hear this crap thrown at fat people – as if we can’t do anything of significance because we happen to be big. Prejudice runs extremely deep in people, to the point where it magically turns into a fact – and MUST apply to all big people.
Confirmation bias, anyone? =/
I used to work with a woman who was about 5′ and 400 pounds. Just standing up made her short of breath. She ate cakes, pastries and doughnuts and drank Coke all day, then every afternoon she would say she was tired and head off to the sick-room for a nap. I think she must have been an undiagnosed diabetic or had prediabetes and the need for a nap was caused by a massive blood sugar crash. But of course, we couldn’t fire her or even suggest she have her blood sugar levels tested because that would have been ZOMG – discimmination against fatties!
Oooh, headless fattie pic.
This is why I think that studies investigating if the common stereotypes of fat employees are true or not can be actually useful.
Last year a study investigated if fat employees are actually less conscientious, less agreeable and less emotionally stable than average as is often assumed. The results indicated that these stereotypes are not true. Most fat acceptance blogs I read were commenting that this study was insulting to fat people in the first place… how could anyone ever consider these stereotypes to be true? The thing is, however, that people clearly DO consider these stereotypes to be true, and having hard data to refute their belief is a good thing in my opinion.
(An abstract of the study I mention can be found here: http://gom.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/33/4/392)
about the picture used…. not even a fattie fattie fatfat at the gym is is good enough! because she’s still a fattie fattie fatfat.
ugh.
I guess that nasty cold that I had that wiped me out for most of last week is all because I’m teh fatz, not because, you know, I picked up a virus or anything. And the reason it circulated my entire family is because we’re all a little chunky.
Of course, I never actually missed work because of it (there are so few people working at my store that it’s almost impossible to call in sick unless you’re on the brink of death or something). I did skip class one day, though. And I seriously considered leaving my internship early one day. Bad fatty! No sickness allowed! If I had just exercised instead of sitting around eating bon bons all day, I’d never have caught it.*
maggiemunkee: seriously.
I feel like we should all take a shot for every headless fatty picture. Even though it’s 9 am.
* – never mind the fact that I walk everywhere and that didn’t change (because it couldn’t) even when I was sick
Ah, the elusive headless fatty. So calm! So unsuspecting!
I’ve been relatively lucky at all my jobs as far as discrimination goes (well, that I know of), but I did find out, shortly before leaving my last job, that my boss at the time had quite a nasty view of fatties. He told one of my coworkers that her student helper was too slow as a result of being too fat to complete a task on time. It really changed my entire view on the guy. I had, up until that point, liked him pretty well because he was nice and polite, though a wildly private person.
I’m deathfat, and rarely miss work or get sick. At my last job, I was working as an activities assistant in a nursing home. I was on my feet 6 hours out of an 8 hour day, five days a week, pushing residents, and doing all kinds of lifting and bending. It was no different than being a CNA/GNA, except we didn’t have to bathe or change residents. I did this while being over 300 lbs…do not tell me that fat people, especially so-called morbidly obese people, do nothing all day but sit on their asses and shove sweets and sodas down their throats. And even if we did, that still does not give people the right to be bigoted jerks.
What about the workers who take 15 smoke breaks a day, call off when they’re too drunk or hungover to come in, have child issues, etc. ?? I have worked worked with these type of people many times and nothing has ever been done to stop their behaviors. being an overweight women, I have had my share of discrimination because of my size, but I have never let my weight be a factor in doing my job. The smoker\drunk I worked with never did her share of the work and nothing was ever done about it. So.. don’t automatically assume that because is of “normal” weight that they are a more desirable worked. It just ain’t so !
I agree with this except for the quoted statement about our culture being obsessed with “fitness.” If anything, we’re obsessed with thinness by any means necessary. I think there’s a HUGE difference and that lends to the stigma against being heavy since what matters is the appearance of health, not health itself.
There are thousands of skinny unhealthy people in America and no one gives them the same kind of pressure as heavy folks that you’d expect to see if fitness was really important instead of skinniness.
Agree with people above, agree that discrimination in workplace=wrong and there’s generally a confirmation bias as one commenter said, but HAVE to agree that as a person with a medically verifiable permanent disability (spinal cord injury) it IS rather insulting to me that people label being obese as a disability. Oh, and I’m one of those smallerish yet less healthy than you people, who totally agrees that size has nothing to do with fitness level. You could outwalk me any day of the week.
I managed to read quite a few comments on that article; several commenters mentioned ‘two airline seats.’ And I have to ask, does it actually work that way? Are the arm rests/seat dividers removable? I don’t fly all that much. The only instance I am familiar with is a friend who flew from St. Louis to Las Vegas just fine. Five days later at the ticket counter in Vegas, she was visually determined to be Too Fat. She had to buy another seat to get home. But she didn’t actually take up two seats, because they were divided by the arm rest. She sat in one seat and had an empty seat next to her. She wasn’t sure if the empty seat was for her Detachable Excess Fat or if Southwest had realized that Fat was contagious and didn’t want to risk any of the other passengers sitting close enough to be exposed.
Is that always the way it works? Or is there a way to combine the seats?
Some of those comments are really great. A few people even give (lengthy) narratives of their experiences being fat, and several of the non-fat people seemed to respond well to that.
I’m fat, and also very competent, and typically perform tasks faster than my coworkers. I was a teacher for several years, but only had 2 experiences where someone judged me for my fatness (at least to my face). In once case, a parent of a student (who did not know me and was not in my class) said, “You’re a teacher? You seem too big to be a teacher.” Ummmm…ok, whatever that means. Then I had a principal who had her own body issues (she was an aging former dancer), and called me in to her office to discuss that she didn’t like the way my pants fit. She even made me do a spin for her so she could comment on what was wrong with them. Then she proceeded to tell me how she thought all fat people should dress. I dressed professionally and conservatively, and there was nothing wrong with my clothing. She was a b**ch.
To clarify, I meant that some of the comments on the actual article (that is linked to) were really great…
While I admit that it is disheartening to read the ignorant
comments about being fat, as an overweight woman, I have always
been professional, on time, and NOT lazy about performing my
job. But clearly I think people are in general just more mean,
nasty, intolerant and vicious now than ever before in all aspects of life. I received a promotion within two years of starting my present job because of excellence in my work, and yes I was FAT!
I think that more people need to stick up for themselves and just not tolerate disrespect in any form. A person’s size has nothing to do with their character. There is entirely too much emphasis on trying to look like these celebs now. Society is obsessed with it and it is effecting our youths; they are learning the wrong values. That looks are more important than the inside and that only ‘perfect’ looking people deserve love, work and happiness and that’s BS.
Be healthy FOR YOU, and damn anyone else’s opinion…’haters’ will never be sated no matter what your size is.
You know, given the statistics on weight in America, if fat people really were as lazy, stupid, unreliable, or whatever as the stereotypes say, then our entire society would be competely non-fuctional right now. There’s no way business and government could survive so many destructive fatties.
Hello,
This is my first time reading your blog. I like that you talk about discrimation and “fatism”. (I guess I have been living in a cave, first time I heard the word)
I am fat. I have been discrimated against because of my weight. People in the west are much more tolerant of fat people. I wonder if our tolerance contributes to general obiesity in the West.
Sorry for the poor spelling. I will be a regular reader of your blog – thanks
I work with a woman who is really obese and obviously unhealthy (I have a daily meeting with her that is far from her office and she always shows up gasping for breath). Her weight has absolutely NO bearing on how well she does her job — she has strengths and weaknesses like everyone, and not one of them can be attributed to her body. What’s interesting to me are the comments made by her superiors when she is not around. Clearly these are HR violations — today it might be somebody saying he feels bad for selecting a meeting place too far from her desk, and tomorrow it might be a comment about my ass when I’M not around. It pays to know your enemies, is what I’m saying.
I’m with those who say “fitness” doesn’t really have much to do with this. You can not exercise ever other than walking to your car, live on beer and bar food, and never touch vegetables or fruit — and as long as you’re thin, almost nobody will ever say a word about it.
What businesses want, generally, are employees who function as hiccup-free as robots. Some people can do this and some can’t, and some can do it sometimes and not at other times, and there are people in all weight ranges who fall into each category. Personally I can’t, and thus have had to find employment that allows for that, but it probably has a lot more to do, in my case, with Asperger’s than fat, and let’s face it, without drugs that make me “obese,” I can’t work at all.
Oh, and one more thing, pursuant to Sandy’s question: If they want us fatasses to buy two seats on planes, they need to find arm rests that actually fold all the way back. I’d rather WALK a thousand miles than fly with this thing poking me in the back for three hours.
“Fatism” is NOT a race so how can it be racist? When I fill out my standardized testing worksheet it doesn’t ask me if I’m Caucasian, Hispanic, Black or Fat! Get real! Being fat is being fat. Fat Discrimination is real but don’t put it the same as being an racially oppressed person. That is the real shame!
I’m also inclined to strongly disagree with the attitude that thin is synonymous with healthy. Many studies have shown that being underweight is more detrimental to the body than being overweight, but these studies are swept under the rug. (It’s not hard to speculate as to why.)
Also, I think a lot of these BMI and weight charts are based solely on numbers and that pisses me off. I’m 5’3″ and I weigh 215 lbs. Think I’m just a self-justifying fatass? Think again! Aside from a noticeable “beer belly,” most of me is a slab of rock-solid muscle wrapped around a fairly large skeleton. Muscle is about 18% denser than fat while “big-boned” is dismissed as the favorite excuse of the terminally fat. Even so, strip me and a more delicately built woman down to our skeletons and the weight difference will astonish you. The point I’m trying to make isn’t that those with larger bones have a ready-made excuse to sit around and pig out every day, but that NUMBERS SOMETIMES LIE.
What pisses me off is that I can run a mile (without fainting, even) and carry a 250 lb man across my shoulders (not at the same time, though or I probably would swoon) but by numbers alone, I’m considered (at a glance) more of a health risk than a 110 lb bulimic whose stomach acid has eaten away most of her upper insides. I think a lot of this “fat phobia” has more to do with looks than with health, but what do I know?
I carry my weight as if overweight but am actually obese. Yet, I do more physical work and produce more than any of my slim co-workers. You have never heard as much belly aching about hurting joints and feeling tired as you do from them.
In return, I am ridiculed for being “mannish” and a good “workhorse”, particularly if my face gets red or the sweat starts running. My boss told me she always heard you need to lose weight if that happens, this coming from somebody who is constantly cold sitting at a desk.
Her social life consists largely of visiting doctors for various, sundry complaints/ailments. I seldom go to a doctor and resent her insisting that she cover my medical insurance to get a better deal on another of her slim employees who has Crohn’s disease.
I could go on and on, but you get the point by now. Not all fat people are lazy. Not all fat people cost employers in lost time or medical ailments. Not all fat people are unproductive. Yet, most fat people experience discrimination in the workplace at one point or another. Been there, seen that.
I worked 30 years as a heavy equipment mechanic. I was a field mechanic. I worked hard, long hours, sweated my ass off and never lost weight. I could out work all the thin guys, and was always requested by the customer to work on their equipment. In 2005 I fell while working on a Motor Grader and messed my back up. I miss working, but now I’m Mr. Mom. Not all fat people are Fat Lazy pigs.
I am a mildly obease guy, but I am active, work hard, and my weight is going slowly via exercise and good diet, plus I’m pretty good at my job. Weight is not an impact, and my colleagues jest with me about being chunky or lumpy, and I appreciate their humor. The point being that there is another gent working here who is grossly overweight, three times my size. In some recent floods as result of his size he did something to his ankle while moving equipment from the workshop to a higher level. Twenty other blokes were doing the same thing and all they suffered were a few aching muscles the next day or two. As a result he had 3 months or more off work, paid mind you. He has come back part time under some rehabilitation scheme. When he is here he does very little work. Technically he can’t cut the mustard with the others in the lab, and is basically a time waster. He is also not liked simply because of his character or lack of it, and pretty much all the time he attends does very little productive work, and is a distraction to people who are doing work. He is also one of the highest paid. He makes no effort to lose weight and has takeaway almost every day, fish and chips, and his “diet” part is having a diet coke with the greasy food. Unfortuneately he is a signatory for our processes, an acreditation that takes years to achieve. So the issue is, his weight is causing most of the problems in the workplace (and in his life), but he is not a good worker anyway, smells awful, has halitosis, and if they were to get rid of him, it will be seen as a “weight related” sacking and the company might get sued or prosecuted. Fat people who do their jobs well, fine, no issue. Fat people who take days off due to obesity related issues and who are not good at their job, how do you deal with that? If there was a fire, there is no way I could drag him out of the workshop, and he could not save me, as he struggles to pick his pencil up off the floor if he drops it. What side of the line does this fall on?
I am an employer who has an obese worker. He is a WONDERFUL person, does not miss work,I’m just concerned about what he is doing to himself. He eats McDonalds for lunch, not all the time, but most days. When we had a biggest looser competition he did not participate. How can I tell this guy we care about him with out making him feel bad?