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Claim: Companies used to dismiss employees by distributing notices printed on pink slips of paper.
Origins: For nearly a century, American workers from all walks of life have lived in fear of one day receiving "pink slips" from their employers — notices printed on pink paper (usually distributed with paychecks) informing employees that their services are no longer required. Pink slips have long since become symbolic rather than literal, however. Nobody can seem to remember a time when it was a common or widespread practice in the
All we know for sure is that the Oxford English Dictionary's oldest citation for the term "pink slip" comes from a 1915 pulp novel about baseball. Beyond that, the origins of "pink slip" are anybody's guess. Peter Liebhold, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., has spent years searching for an example of an actual pink slip, but even though he and his colleagues have turned up similar artifacts (such as the red twill used to bundle documents in the 19th century, a symbol we now know as bureaucratic "red tape"), the dreaded pink slip has remained elusive. Over the years people have offered plenty of examples of companies that supposedly used pink slips to fire their employees, but none that has ever been verified. The most common explanation (also unverified) predictably concerns the Ford Motor Company (as Henry Ford and his business are commonly viewed as the prototype that established the modern corporate employer-employee business relationship):
The "pink slip" has come a long way from when Henry Ford dreamed up a way to evaluate his assembly line employees. Each worker had a cubbyhole where at the end of the workday, a manager would place a piece of colored paper. A white piece of paper meant their work was acceptable, a pink one meant the boot.
If no company ever really used pink slips before "pink slip" entered the language, then where did the term come from?
Other languages have also used terms for dismissals related to colorful paperwork — Germans would "get the blue letter" ("den blauen Brief bekommen"), and the French military dismissed personnel with a "yellow paper" ("cartouche jaune") — but perhaps the "pink slip" doesn't have anything to do with color at all. Consider that we often use terms relating to injury or violence to describe the severing of a relationship (e.g., a fired employee has "gotten the axe," a player who doesn't make the team is said to have been "cut"), and that when used as a verb, "pink" means "to pierce" or "to stab" (hence the item known as "pinking shears") or "to wound by criticism or ridicule." For now, "pink slip" and its cousin, the blue law, remain colorful mysteries. Last updated: 9 July 2007 This material may not be reproduced without permission. snopes and the snopes.com logo are registered service marks of snopes.com.  Sources:
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