Amazon.com’s Whole Foods Market doesn’t want to be forced to let workers wear “Black Lives Matter” masks and is pointing to the recent US Supreme Court ruling permitting a business owner to refuse services to same-sex couples to get federal regulators to back off.
National Labor Relations Board prosecutors have accused the grocer of stifling worker rights by banning staff from wearing BLM masks or pins on the job. The company countered in a filing that its own rights are being violated if it’s forced to allow BLM slogans to be worn with Whole Foods uniforms.
Amazon is the most prominent company to use the high court’s June ruling that a Christian web designer was free to refuse to design sites for gay weddings, saying the case “provides a clear roadmap” to throw out the NLRB’s complaint.
The dispute is one of several in which labor board officials are considering what counts as legally-protected, work-related communication and activism on the job.
Why does anybody think it’s a good idea to wear political statements into work? Just do your job.
Imagine if you ran a business and one of your customer-facing employees showed up in a MAGA hat. You’d probably want them to leave it at home right?
You think equal rights and fair treatment for all is “politics”?
They aren’t banning masks that say “equal rights and fair treatment for ALL” , they are banning BLM masks, BLM is a political movement/organization.
No BLM is a statement that black lives matter. That’s completely different from saying, for instance, blue lives matter. One is a race that people are born into and the other is a job. It’s not political, it’s a cry for help.
Ya it’s a political movement that wants cops to stop killing black people.
Unfortunately it is.
Either employees should be allowed to wear personal accessories to express themselves, or they should not. How do you define what is and is not political?
Also, this article’s vague, but “no slogans, logos, or advertising except for Whole Foods branding” is Whole Foods’s official dress code. https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/employment-law/pages/whole-foods-black-lives-matter-mask.aspx
The problem with all of these things is always unequal enforcement. For example if the store allowed an employee to wear a thin blue line mask, and fired another employee for a BLM mask
Except the store didn’t do that
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It’s was a dismissed court case… What are you talking about “we don’t know” court records are a thing. You can get them directly by submitting a FOIA request.
Or just reading the new articles that spawned from the case.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/judge-dismisses-whole-foods-workers-lawsuit-over-black-lives-matter-masks-2023-01-23/
There’s no evidence that it was unfairly applied. And if you have such evidence I’m sure you can submit it to the plaintiff’s lawyers and they’ll set you up with a sweet payday.
Would ALSO cover “thin blue line” as well btw… Technically it would cover the proper American flag as well…
Agreed, if I ran a grocery store chain I’d just have the employees wear uniforms with no personal expression.
At the end of the day it’s the business’s right to set whatever policy they want though. If the government decides employees have a constitutionally protected right to wear whatever they want to wear to work, we’re gonna see a lot of crazy bullshit.
Would it be a bad thing? I think with some sensible exceptions it would be a very good thing to permit free expression as the default.
I would agree with you, but this is pretty blatant far-right bias and with the genocidal turn that camp has taken, it’s vitally important to take sides.
Otherwise, I agree with you.
Lol “genocidal turn”
I think it’s good when people support good things and bad when people support bad things. Amorally applying the rules for their own sake is actually not a virtue; the rules should be oriented to promote good outcomes and discourage bad outcomes. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Who decides what’s good or bad?
We all do. We already do this throughout society. Individually we make choices on what is good or bad, and collectively those choices add up and are expressed either in law or social contract.
I actually had to talk to the boss and tell him that this manager’s motherfucking confederate flag hat made me uncomfortable, like he was a floor manager who wore the stars and bars every day, in a western state that didn’t exist during the civil war… and they didn’t say anything to him until a customer complained. He wore that shit for like a month. The good ol boy’s club is unreal
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That’s where the constant disclaimers to the effect of ‘the views expressed do not nessecarily reflect the position of the company blah blah blah’ whenever someone speaks who isnt the principal executive of the organization. The problem being though it doesn’t go both ways, when one of the high leaders speaks it’s portrayed as ‘our company believes’ which then at least somewhat implies the employees of said company are in agreement. Individual expression is just leveling the field by letting the employees say 'the views of the company do not reflect my own.
It’s less common for any smart business to make highly charged statements unless they happen to be sure the majority will support them for it, but not unknown. I’ve seen a couple small ones around here that went as far as to plaster Q slogans all over their signs. From a business perspective they just alienated a major portion of their potential customers without anyone setting foot in the door.