US Senate Relaxes Dress Code. Should Your Company Follow Suit?

The acceptance of a less buttoned-up appearance for U.S. senators on the Senate floor is causing a dress code uproar. However, the Senate is simply “joining workplaces across the country that have become more casual since the Covid-19 pandemic,” The Wall Street Journal noted.

Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., this week informed the sergeant-at-arms to no longer enforce the unwritten dress code that required men and women senators to wear business attire on the Senate floor. The dress code had been “strictly adhered to over the past 20 years,” according to The Hill. For example, former Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., would stay just off the Senate floor while voting when he was in gym clothes to “avoid breaching decorum,” The Hill reported. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., who often wears gym shorts and a hoodie, votes from the doorway of the party cloakroom or the side entrance before ducking out, The Associated Press reported.

Senate Republicans are in a furor, and most signed a letter to Schumer on Tuesday asking him to continue enforcing the Senate’s previous, more formal dress code, according to CNN.

“I think there is a certain dignity that we should be maintaining in the Senate, and to do away with the dress code, to me, debases the institution,” said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. The 70-year-old politician joked to reporters that in view of the relaxed dress code she planned to “wear a bikini” one day this week, according to various news reports.

A majority of U.S. workers…