Interns Get Fired En Masse After Protesting Dress Code at Work

And yes I have read your comment but it doesn't matter, your job description doesn't have to be customer facing to mandate a dress code, the image of the office especially if there is high foot traffic in it might be important to your employer, the ability to drag employees at will to meetings, pre-sale, video-confs etc which might include external people without needing to worry about what stupid shirt they might wear today is also a good enough reason and overall having an environment where everyone can pick fairly cheap office work/business attire without having to worry about what they wear also makes it comfortable for a lot of people.

Oddly enough the looser dress codes usually go against the direct benefits to employees they are a tool just like the beer fridge, ping pong table and video games room that companies use to remove the gap between your personal life and your work life, they want you to feel that the workplace is an extension of yourself and home is where your bed is when you aren't sleeping in one of the nice sleeping rooms at your work.

Work cloths on the other hand allow you to easily switch between work and your personal life, you put a suit in the morning you go to work, you take it off and boom you are in your saggy tshirt that says I'm with stupid doing whatever you want. So if you are against the workplace invading into your personal space during off work hours you might want to actually rethink what brining your own personal life into your workplace does and why some employers especially in tech encourage that.

You can't cave to pointless demands of interns especially after you already said no to them, you don't need to give them a justification when your boss says no arguing continuing on arguing with them is usually pointless unless the circumstances changed.

Passing around a petition to force the hands of your managers would never lead to good results, this isn't about employee rights this isn't about unions this is about young people acting up because likely no one to that point ever said no to them because they were too afraid.

I've seen what happens in schools lately at least in higher education where teachers seem to be afraid of their students rather than the other way around, I somehow feel lucky that I was at the borders of this generation before things went out of head and I remember when being rude to a teach or disruptive in class meant a call to my parents and a whole lot of trouble to me.

We somehow went from standing up when the teacher enters the classroom and showing respect to showing the middle finger and getting angry parents defending their kids because they are special.

We went from higher education being a place of critical thought where people were challenged with multiple views and paradigms to a place of safe spaces where students can rally because a teacher hurts their feeling when they talk about touchy subjects.

It seems that over a few decades we went from a society that aimed for the stars and challenged everything to an infantile group that things that cuddling each other is the most important thing in life because everyone is special in their own way.

And I'm really happy that these for lack of a better word "kids" learned this the hard way and early enough that they might still snap out of it, no one owes you anything not even an explanation, life isn't a democracy at best it's a meritocracy you are valued based on what your actively bring to the table not merely because you exist.

But then amusingly, your plaintive comment on "how things are" quickly turns into an impassioned rant about "how things should be" - which funnily enough is just how things used to be. Maybe you learnt the rules, you did the hard yards, you are just starting to get ahead, and now these upstarts are trying to change the rules.

Your whole argument turns on respecting the power structures of the status quo. It seems so horribly entitled to suggest that because the current power structure of organisations support dictator style management, that one cannot try to find ways to undermine that power structure. Organising, complaining, publicly naming and shaming, are just some of the levers to pull to try to readjust the current power structures in your favour.. and why wouldn't you? What manager respects and rewards quiet acquiescence?

"Nothing is wrong with the current management structure we have"

Completely indefensible. There is plenty wrong. No small part of what is wrong is to do with the way people's egos and prejudices get turned into policy and power. And there are a whole world of options between dictatorship and direct democracy. Everything else you describe past this point is, once again, a description of how things are, not how they should be. Your experiences are a description of how to function under an inopportune power structure.

Just as it is fair to say that the manager decided that this act was insubordination and needed to be punished by a firing, it is also fair to say that if there is a company policy which does not effect revenue but does effect quality of life, then it is perfectly reasonable to organise with your fellow workers to change it. The only error from the interns here was about not gathering enough power to actually see through the change.

"If anything has failed her here it's her education system that up till now didn't taught her that a petition is worthless, that if you want to something to change you build a position of substance and argue that one."

Fully agree with this, but as a starting point of not understanding the way something works, testing it, finding the edge cases and breaking it down is a good start. Do you not do this with every new tool you use? Besides, the real issue you alluded to before is that they basically didn't get that by signing a petition they were organising. The boss understood this and his over the top response is indicative of why organising needs to be protected in law (in a fair and balanced way).

PS. "I don't think that it's fair to equate the current management style of most companies to dictatorships".

Fair enough, oligarchy then.. When the choice is 'my way or the highway', and when they are telling you how to act and how to dress, how else would you describe it?