All dressed up with somewhere to go
Adam Bernstein
Monday, March 1, 2021
There’s a lot of tax law regarding work uniforms – not least of all, what exactly constitutes a uniform. If your staff wear one, you need to know where you stand.
While some think of staff uniforms as being a relatively recent ‘perk’, history indicates that they reach back to the Middle Ages, at least in Britain, where some would wear a badge to denote their job or role.
Messengers, for example, would wear the insignia of the noble or royal family they served – the idea being that this legitimised the document or message being carried. Similarly, merchants wore a badge to represent the guild that they belonged to. By the 18th century, servants were in liveries noting the houses they were employed by.