They want all of the benefits of appearing multicultural but none of the drawbacks—i.e. the multicultural policy is aesthetic only. It has zero bearing on actual multiculturalism and therefore is instantly revoked in the face of friction.

The business as a money-making-machine doesn’t actually care about the spirit of this policy, it’s just a means to an end and not as compassionate as it looks at first glance.

Would I have to cover this up outside of the workplace? Never, because I am protected by freedom of speech. If someone told me to cover it up outside of my workplace, I would tell them to go fuck themselves and utterly refuse to do so.

And, wonderfully, there is nothing that thou can be threatened with outside of thy work (without breaking the law, anyway.) At work thou can be threatened with being fired—outside of work nobody has the power to threaten thee with anything legally.

When the Government’s place to guarantee certain rights collides with private interests, though, things get interesting. The First Amendment brilliantly requires that Congress make no laws that support or deny free expression and to wit it actually obligates representatives of that Government to guarantee that that their involvement does not violate that decree. If the Government has absolutely no claim into this private interest (the business) they have no authority to tell them what to do in these circumstances.

After all, the owners of this private business have their own right to free expression and also control over their presentation, which in fact directly collides with the presentation and free expression of their employees. This lands the tension directly in the court of employee rights vs. employer rights and the application of freedom of expression between. Sometimes the Government has to arbitrate (this is what civil courts are for) but the First Amendment does not tell them how to do it.

Courts have ruled both ways in various incarnations of this problem. But in a very general sense the businesses usually come out on top because an employee must have the resources to actually stand up against this sort of behavior if they want to change anything—and how many workers of any vein can do that?

This inherent imbalance of power has a profoundly chilling effect on expression, which is why we have other legal doctrines to help defend us in the workplace such as the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 – http://uspolitics.about.com/od/civilrightsact/Civil_Rights_Act.htm – but even this doesn’t quite cover body modification like tattoos. (I keep coming back to the tattoo because I really need to limit my discussion, this issue is staggeringly vast.) The fact that the tattoo can be covered to accommodate requests by the employer may sway a court’s decision on the subject; but so does the fact of hiring even though they would have been fully aware of the tattoo in the first place—it’s not exactly invisible on thou, after all, I’ve seen it.

This is the case of a morally ambivalent company using a flimsy policy to garner good will and community brownie points while not risking anything with it.