Why companies like UPS and Disney are allowing workers to show their tattoos
Research isn’t exact, but recent polling shows that as many as half of Americans under the age of 40 have a tattoo, and that has implications for the job market.
Hinterhaus Productions | Stone | Getty Images
The growing battle to attract and retain workers has led employers to adjust longstanding workplace and hiring policies, from embracing hybrid and remote work to eliminating college degree requirements. A less-covered policy also changing: visible display of tattoos on workers.
Companies including Disney, UPS and Virgin Atlantic have relaxed their dress and style codes to allow employees to show their tattoos in the workplace. Many of the moves have come over the past two years as the tight labor market that preceded Covid became even more intensely competitive during the pandemic.
When longtime Home Depot CFO Carol Tomé was named CEO of UPS in June 2020, many of her first efforts to shake up the package delivery giant centered around increasing the job satisfaction of the company’s more than 534,000 workers globally. A few of those initiatives centered on the company’s dress and style restrictions.
“We did not allow facial hair; we did not allow natural hair. So, if you’re African American and you wanted to have an afro or twist or braid, that wasn’t permitted. Our tattoo policy was more restrictive than the U.S. Army,” Tomé told CNBC last year.
UPS, well known for its regimented brown uniform and driver dress code, acknowledged that it needed to make changes that “would create a more modern workplace for our employees that allows them to bring their authentic selves to work,” said Christopher Bartlett, UPS vice president of people and culture.
Initially, UPS looked at its hair- and beard-related policies, which previously barred men from having hair that extended below the collar or beards. The adjusted policy, rolled out in November 2020, now permits beards and mustaches “worn in a businesslike manner,” as well as several “natural hairstyles.” The policy, however, says employees are expected to maintain a neat and clean appearance “appropriate for their job and workplace,” and that hair or beard length can’t be a safety concern.
Shifting views on tattoos at work
Bartlett said after that policy was well received, UPS began looking at changes to its tattoo policy. Previously, the company barred employees from showing any visible tattoos — workers with tattoos had to cover them with long sleeves or pants, or skin-colored coverings.
After a series of culture surveys, discussions with employees and other research, UPS settled on a new policy announced in April 2021 that would allow employees to show their tattoos provided they don’t contain any offensive words or images. Workers are also not allowed to have tattoos on their hands, head, neck or face.
“Tattoos matter to people, and while there was a time where people may have gotten a tattoo on a whim, more frequently now a tattoo really matters to someone; it’s part of who they are,” Bartlett said. “We wanted people to feel like they could bring themselves to work not only in their current job but as they thought about their whole career.”
Disney‘s parks division underwent a similar shift in April 2021, updating its dress and style code to allow workers to show their tattoos, which it said was part of a wider effort to make its employees and guests feel more welcome at its theme parks.
The policy change “provides greater flexibility with respect to forms of personal expression surrounding gender-inclusive hairstyles, jewelry, nail styles, and costume choices; and allowing appropriate visible tattoos,” Josh D’Amaro, chairman of Disney parks, experiences and products, wrote in a blog post on Disney’s website.
“We’re updating them to not only remain relevant in today’s workplace, but also enable our cast members to better express their cultures and individuality at work,” D’Amaro wrote.
According to the Disney cast member handbook, visible tattoos that are no larger than an extended hand are permitted except for any on the face, head, or neck. For larger tattoos on the arm or leg, employees can wear matching fabric tattoo sleeves. Any tattoos that depict nudity, offensive or inappropriate language, or violate any company policies are also not permitted.
Disney did not respond to a request for comment.
Virgin Atlantic, the British airline owned by Richard Branson, removed its ban on visible tattoos for uniformed employees in May. Estelle Hollingsworth, chief people officer at Virgin Atlantic, said in an emailed statement, “Many people use tattoos to express their unique identities and our customer-facing and uniformed colleagues should not be excluded from doing so if they choose.”
The U.S. Army has taken similar steps, rolling out an updated directive in June further expanding its tattoo allowance, including tattoos on hands and the back of the neck. The Army previously relaxed its restrictions that limited the number of tattoos that recruits and soldiers could have on their arms and legs in 2015.
“We always review policy to keep the Army as an open option to as many people as possible who want to serve,” Maj. Gen. Doug Stitt, Director of Military Personnel Management, told the Army’s news service. “This directive makes sense for currently serving Soldiers and allows a greater number of talented individuals the opportunity to serve now.”
According to the United States Army Training and Doctrine Command, 41% of 18- to 34-year-olds have at least one or more tattoos.
Customers more accepting of tattooed workers
Enrica Ruggs, an associate professor at the University of Houston C.T. Bauer College of Business Department of Management and Leadership, said that there have been long-standing negative stigmas towards tattoos that harkened back to biker culture and a sense that rebellious people were the ones that got tattoos. That carried over into corporate culture, where hiring managers would stereotype applicants with visible tattoos, or where employers would worry that employing someone with tattoos would turn off customers.
However, Ruggs said recent research found that most tattoos now reflect a sense of belonging – for example, in-memorial images, callouts to their culture or profession, or a tattoo that matches one on a loved one.
Ruggs ran an experiment measuring customer reaction to workers wearing temporary tattoos. While some customers still held negative stereotypes about tattoos, the tattooed employees had just as many sales as the untattooed ones. Negative stereotypes also did not negatively affect customer perception of the organization. In fact, tattooed employees in white-color or creative jobs were looked at more favorably and competent than non-tattooed employees by customers, Ruggs’ research showed.
“Part of the argument has always been that it’ll hurt the organization, and that could actually change a consumer’s purchasing behavior,” Ruggs said. “But if the cornerstone of your business is service, that’s not changing, but allowing and relaxing some of these policies can help with employee morale and can expand who you can hire, which can help to improve employee performance. If employees are happy and they feel satisfied with their employee, they are likely to also be very productive.”
While there aren’t exact statistics regarding tattoos, a January Rasmussen Reports survey found that nearly half of Americans under 40 have tattoos. Across all ages, 33% of Americans have tattoos, the survey found.
The New York City Council currently has a bill that would look to curb discrimination against people with tattoos, including in the workplace. The bill would add tattoos to the categories in the city’s administrative code that are already prohibited from discrimination such as race or sexual orientation. While it would still allow employers to mandate that employees cover tattoos, it would require them to prove that not showing a tattoo is a “bona fide occupational qualification.”
Bartlett said that after UPS changed its policy, he noticed that several employees posted their UPS-themed tattoos on the company’s internal message board.
“When someone puts a UPS logo on them after a 25-year driving career here, that matters, and it shows that the company matters to them,” he said. “This isn’t a P&L play here, but this is about inclusion and bringing your authentic self to work.”
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Tesla displays Optimus next to two of its vehicles at the World Robot Conference in Beijing on Aug. 22, 2024.
CNBC | Evelyn
Tesla’s vice president of Optimus robotics, Milan Kovac, said on Friday that he’s leaving the company.
In a post on X, Kovac thanked Tesla CEO Elon Musk and reminisced about his tenure, which began in 2016.
“I want to thank @elonmusk from the bottom of my heart for his trust and teachings over the decade we’ve worked together,” Kovac wrote. “Elon, you’ve taught me to discern signal from noise, hardcore resilience, and many fundamental principles of engineering. I am forever grateful. Tesla will win, I guarantee you that.”
Tesla is developing Optimus with the aim of someday selling it as a bipedal, intelligent robot capable of everything from factory work to babysitting.
In a first-quarter shareholder deck, Tesla said it was on target for “builds of Optimus on our Fremont pilot production line in 2025, with wider deployment of bots doing useful work across our factories.”
During Tesla’s 2024 annual shareholder meeting, Musk characterized himself as “pathologically optimistic,” then claimed the humanoid robots would lift the company’s market cap to $25 trillion at an unspecified future date.
In recent weeks, Musk told CNBC’s David Faber that Tesla is now training its Optimus systems to do “primitive tasks,” like picking up objects, open a door or throw a ball.
Competitors in the space include Boston Dynamics, Agility Robotics, Apptronik, 1X and Figure.
Kovac had previously served as the company’s director of Autopilot software engineering. He rose to lead the company’s Optimus unit as vice president in 2022.
Musk personally thanked Kovac for his “outstanding contributions” to the business.
Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.
President Donald Trump holds a news conference with Elon Musk to mark the end of the Tesla CEO’s tenure as a special government employee overseeing the U.S. DOGE Service on Friday May 30, 2025 in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington.
Tom Brenner | The Washington Post | Getty Images
Tesla has been facing massive challenges trying to get back on track after a disastrous first quarter. Those headwinds strengthened considerably this week.
CEO Elon Musk officially concluded his term with the Trump administration at the end of May, hitting the 130-day mark, the maximum time allowed for a “special government employee.” On his way out the door, Musk expressed sharp criticism of the Trump’s signature spending bill that’s being debated in Congress due to its expected impact on the national debt.
What started off as a policy disagreement quickly escalated into an all-out online brawl, with Musk and President Donald Trump hurling insults at one other from their respective social media platforms. After Musk called the “one, big beautiful bill” an “abomination” and rallied his followers on X to “kill the bill,” Trump said Musk had gone “CRAZY” and threatened to end government contracts and cut off subsidies for Musk’s companies. Musk responded, “Go ahead, make my day.”
The rift sent Tesla shares plummeting 14% on Thursday, wiping out roughly $152 billion in value, the most for any day in the company’s 15 year-history on the public market. While Musk is still the richest person in the world on paper, his net worth plunged by $34 billion, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index.
More importantly, the spat brought about the collapse to a relationship that blended business, politics and power in a manner virtually unprecedented in U.S. history. The ramifications to Tesla, which fell out of the trillion-dollar club on Thursday, could be severe, and not just because Trump is reportedly considering selling or giving away the red Model S he purchased in March after turning the White House lawn into a Tesla showroom.
A senior White House official told NBC News on Friday that the president was “not interested” in having a call with Musk to resolve their feud.
Ire from the Trump administration could influence everything from future regulation, investigations and government support for Tesla, to decisions on tariff exemptions the company has been seeking in order to purchase Chinese-made manufacturing equipment.
Tesla shares were badly underperforming the broader market before the Musk-Trump breakup. Revenue slid 9% in the first quarter from a year earlier, with auto revenue plummeting 20%, due to the combination of increased competition from lower-cost EV makers in China and a consumer backlash to Trump’s political activities and rhetoric.
It’s certainly not what Tesla shareholders were expecting, when they sent the stock up about 30% in the days following Trump’s election victory in November. After spending close to $300 million to return Trump to the White House, Musk was poised to have a major role in the administration and be in position to push through regulatory changes in ways that benefited his companies.
Instead, his company has suffered, and Musk’s behavior is largely to blame.
One of his most divisive actions in leading the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was the dismantling of USAID, which previously delivered billions of dollars of food and medicine to more than 100 countries.
Beyond the U.S., Musk has endorsed Germany’s far-right extremist party AfD, and gave a gesture that many viewed as a Nazi salute at an inauguration rally.
In response, in recent months, there were numerous cases of vandalism or arson of Tesla facilities or vehicles in the U.S., as well as waves of peaceful protests at Tesla stores and service centers in North America and Europe.
Advertisements in protest of Musk have appeared in New York’s Times Square, and at bus shelters in London, urging people to boycott Tesla, some labeling the company’s EVs as “swasticars.” The Vancouver International Auto Show even removed Tesla from its exhibitors’ list fearing the company’s presence would cause safety problems.
On top all that are President Trump’s sweeping tariffs, which have led to concerns that costs will increase for parts and materials crucial for EV production. In its first-quarter earnings report in April, Tesla refrained from promising growth this year and said it will “revisit our 2025 guidance in our Q2 update.”
Board is mum
Pension funds that invest in Tesla have said the “crisis” at the company requires a leader to work a minimum of 40 hours per week to focus on solving its problems.
Public officials are echoing that sentiment, and calling on Tesla’s board to take action.
New York City Comptroller Brad Lander said on Thursday in s statement to CNBC that the “schoolyard fight” between Trump and Musk highlights how “Tesla’s weak accountability measures and poor governance threaten not only the company’s financial stability and shareholder value, but also the future of homegrown EV production.”
Brooke Lierman, comptroller of Maryland, told CNBC in an email that the company’s board “is not doing its job to ensure that there is a CEO at Tesla who is putting the company’s interests first.”
Since Musk’s name is synonymous with Tesla, the board needs to ensure that Tesla can stand on its own regardless of who’s leading the company, she added.
“Musk’s behavior continues to threaten the future of Tesla,” Lierman said. “As long as Tesla is identified with Elon Musk and he continues to be a polarizing figure, he will continue to damage the brand which is a huge part of Tesla’s value.”
Musk didn’t respond to a request for comment. CNBC also reached out for comment to board chair Robyn Denholm and directors and executives who work in government relations and in the office of the CEO. None of them responded as of the time of publication.
Elon Musk interviews on CNBC from the Tesla Headquarters in Texas.
CNBC
Tesla investors focused on business fundamentals are justified in their skepticism.
The company has failed to roll out innovative and affordable new model EVs, while Chinese competitors like BYD have flooded the market, particularly in Europe.
Analysts at Goldman Sachs on Thursday lowered their price target on Tesla mostly due to the outlook for 2025. Deliveries this quarter are tracking lower for the U.S., the analysts noted, while European sales saw a 50% year-over-year decline in April and another double-digit drop in May. China sales from those two months were down about 20% from a year earlier.
Quality is also a problem. Tesla has announced eight voluntary recalls of the Cybertruck in 15 months due to a range of issues including software bugs and sticking accelerator pedals.
Robotaxi ready?
Musk is urging investors to largely ignore the core business and look to the future, which he says is all about autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots.
But even there, Tesla is behind. In AVs the company has ceded ground to Alphabet’s Waymo, which is operating commercial robotaxi services in several U.S. markets. After a decade of missed deadlines, Musk has promised a small launch of a Tesla driverless ride-hailing service in Austin this month.
The Austin robotaxi service will operate in a geofenced area, Musk said in a recent interview with CNBC’s David Faber, and will begin with a small fleet of just 10 to 20 Model Y vehicles with Full Self-Driving (FSD) Unsupervised technology installed. If all goes well, Musk has said, Tesla will try to rapidly expand its driverless offerings to other markets like San Francisco and Los Angeles.
What consumers won’t be seeing anytime soon are the Cybercab and Robovan vehicles that Tesla touted at its “We, Robot” event last year to drum up customer and investor enthusiasm.
On Friday, Milan Kovac, Tesla’s vice president of Optimus robotics, announced he was leaving after joining the company in 2016. Musk thanked him for his “outstanding contribution” in a post on X.
Still, there are plenty Tesla bulls and Musk fanboys who are believers in the CEO’s vision. The stock’s 4% rebound on Friday is a sign that some saw an opportunity to buy the dip.
“I think the real story here is the investor base of Tesla literally doesn’t care about anything,” Josh Brown, CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management and CNBC PRO contributor, told CNBC’s “Halftime Report” Friday. “This is still a nothing matters stock.”
FundStrat’s Tom Lee said the Tesla selloff was “overdone.”
Tesla’s market cap, which is dramatically inflated relative to every other U.S. car maker, is built on Musk’s vision of Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robots doing factory work and babysitting our children, while self-driving Cybercabs and Robovans make money carting around passengers.
Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas wrote in a note this week that, “Tesla still holds so many valuable cards that are largely apolitical,” pointing to what he sees as the company’s “AI leadership, autonomy/robotics, manufacturing, supply chain re-architecture, renewable power, [and] critical infrastructure.”
In terms of Tesla’s existing business, the most immediate impact from what’s happening in Washington D.C., is the rollback of EV credits in the current budget bill that Musk loudly opposes and that’s struggling to find sufficient support in the Senate. There’s also the matter of the tariffs and whether Tesla is able to get preferred treatment, a proposition that seems increasingly unlikely with the Musk-Trump fallout.
Matthew LaBrot, a former Tesla staff program manager, told CNBC that he’s not surprised that Musk blew up his relationship with the president. LaBrot was terminated earlier this year after sending an open letter in protest of Musk’s divisive political activity.
“I am devastated for the country and the climate, though Elon only has himself to blame,” LaBrot said in an interview. “Back a loose canon, expect stray canon fire.”
Tesla investors can’t know at the moment how much of Musk’s energy and time will now return to his lone public company, and the business responsible for the vast majority of his wealth. Even without politics, he still has SpaceX, AI startup xAI and brain tech startup Neuralink, among other businesses.
As of Thursday, Musk still had a West Wing office that hadn’t been cleaned out, two administration officials told NBC News. The space will likely be packed up in the coming days, one of the officials said.
And while his time in the Trump camp may be over, Musk has called on his followers to form a new party in the U.S.
“Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?” he wrote on X on Thursday, in a post that’s now pinned at the top of his page. According to the post, 80% of 5.6 million respondents to the unofficial poll said “yes.”
Musk’s actions this week may have caused a permanent rift with the president. But one thing is clear — his company can’t get away from the White House.
The Docusign Inc. application for download in the Apple App Store on a smartphone arranged in Dobbs Ferry, New York, U.S., on Thursday, April 1, 2021.
Tiffany Hagler-Geard | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Shares of DocuSign tanked 18% in trading on Friday, a day after the e-signature provider reported stronger-than-expected earnings but slashed its full-year billings outlook.
Here’s how the company performed in the fiscal first quarter, compared with estimates from analysts polled by LSEG:
- Earnings per share: 90 cents, adjusted, vs. 81 cents expected
- Revenue: $764 million vs. $748 million expected
Billings, a closely-watched sales metric, came in at $739.6 million in the fiscal first quarter, which ended April 30. That was lower than the $746 million expected by analysts, according to StreetAccount. It also fell short of the company’s own forecast, which guided for billings between $741 million and $751 million.
For the current fiscal year, DocuSign said it expects billings of $3.28 billion to $3.34 billion, down from a range of $3.3 billion to $3.35 billion.
In the first quarter of DocuSign’s 2026 fiscal year, revenue jumped 8% year over year to $764 million. Subscription revenue increased 8% from the same period a year ago to $746.2 million.
DocuSign reported net income of $72.1 million, or 34 cents per share, compared to net income of $33.8 million, or 16 cents per share, a year earlier.
For the fiscal second quarter, the company expects revenue to be between $777 million and $781 million, compared to consensus estimates of $775 million, according to LSEG. For the full fiscal year, DocuSign projected revenue of $3.15 billion to $3.16 billion. Analysts were expecting $3.14 billion, according to LSEG.
The company also announced an additional $1 billion stock buyback, taking its share repurchase plan to $1.4 billion.
DocuSign shares are down more than 16% year to date.
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