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.
So if they’re banning BLM as political, do they have to be even handed and ban all political iconography?
Is a rainbow political? Obviously anything with an American flag is political, so those need to be banned. Anything like a cross obviously would be forbidden - necklaces would have to be tucked in and invisible. Christianity is far more of a political thing in the US than BLM, as it’s being used to specifically and actively drive legislation. Would they then have to ban employees from other religious dress, like wearing a hijab or yarmulke? I don’t recall Muslims or Jews passing legislation in the name of their religion at the national level, but do activities in Dearborn or Williamsburg count?
Are wedding rings heteronormative? They’re certainly both a cultural and a social thing. Makeup is also both cultural and social, and additionally potentially has gendered implications. If we ban rainbows, do we ban anyone wearing makeup or require everyone to do so, since they’re potentially signaling gender identity?
I’m going to start using GOP rhetoric and replace rainbow flag with wedding rings.
Wedding rings is woke propaganda.
Makes sense to me. If it’s political for me to be able to get married because I’m gay, I don’t see why straight couples shouldn’t be up on the chopping block. So no employee better be wearing a ring.
Yes… because the policy is
https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/employment-law/pages/whole-foods-black-lives-matter-mask.aspx
I think you’re way into the weeds here and forget the most important thing to remember about “freedom”: things like the Bill of Rights and the Constitution are a compact between you and the government, not you and private companies. Private companies don’t owe you anything besides whatever the government has expressly legislated, such as explicit protection for religious clothing and icons like crosses, Sikh turbans, etc.
However, beyond that, individual companies have the right to request their employees look and dress in certain ways. The flip side there is, if you don’t like those rules, you are free to not work there anymore.
Of course, legislators can always choose to pass laws forcing companies to allow more exemptions, but that hasn’t happened yet for displays of a political organisation.
@trias10
I get that. It makes logical sense. It’s just that corporations have so much power to impose their will and it feels weird to me that we let them do that even when it comes to how a human presents themself.
I agree with you about that, but these employees have chosen to do a job where they come face to face with customers daily, and some of those customers may get offended by seeing an employee wearing a BLM badge, in red states for example. The company doesn’t want to antagonise a potential customer and lose a sale, so they’re asking that no employees wear any political markings. And honestly, I think that’s a fair request if you work in a customer-facing role.
Notice that this ruling only applies to Whole Foods workers, not Amazon warehouse workers, who can probably wear whatever they want since they don’t deal with customers.
Because it is weird. It’s even weirder for any average person to defend it.
No, I am very well aware of that. But they’re not saying “You can’t wear a BLM button because we do not think black lives matter, but you can wear a proud boys one if you want.”
They may or may not have that right - that’s going to depend on both the currently existing corporate rules and any state/local legislation.
I was thinking in particular about a case in the past 5 or so years where a company was sued for forbidding one employee from wearing a hijab while allowing others to wear crosses. It was a case of religious discrimination.
My point is that for this to be non-discriminatory it has to be a policy that’s handled in an even handed fashion. Of course it has nothing to do with the constitution - I’m not even sure why you’d introduce that unless you’re staying to strawman. But I know that I can’t fire someone for saying in the workplace that they agree with Trump unless I have a wholesale policy banning talking about politics. I’d be in trouble if I said people could talk about politics, but they could only say nice things about Biden and bad things about Trump. You might be able to get away with that at a locally owned auto body shop, but not at a major corporation.
My further point is that saying that black lives matter isn’t political, unless there’s a major political party that thinks black lives don’t matter. Rainbows aren’t political, unless there’s a major political party that thinks the LGBT community shouldn’t be visible. Books on gay parents aren’t political unless there’s a political party that thinks gay people shouldn’t be allowed to be parents. But that same party would allow a flag pin, or a yellow ribbon, or a book about a hetero couple with a kid. It’s only political when they disagree with it. Otherwise it’s just “normal.”
You actually can fire people based on their political beliefs, because believe it or not, political affiliation is not a protected class under current US federal law (maybe some state law though). There are only 7 current federally protected classes: age, race, sex, religion, marital status, disability, and sexual orientation. That’s why Republicans have been announcing they want to make political affiliation a protected class soon, because I guess that’s the next big battleground, is employers start to hire/fire based on politics.
I take your points, but I guarantee you this isn’t a decision about politics by Amazon, but purely a maximisation of revenue decision. Whole Foods employees interact with customers face to face, every day, all across the US, from blue states to red states. They know that their customers in some places consider BLM to be a political organisation, one that they don’t support, and that goes for proud boys, KKK, whatever. The point is, you don’t want to antagonise any customers coming in through the door, and corporate is aware that people are awfully sensitive these days and ready to kick off over any tiny thing, so to ensure no customer gets offended and takes their business elsewhere, and to ensure a policy which can be applied nationally for all states where Whole Foods exists, it’s just easier to say they won’t allow anything which their customers could potentially consider political.
That’s all this is, it’s not the political dog whistle some are making it out to be. This is just corporations wanting to remain neutral and take money from every customer, not just liberal ones. Hence I agree with this policy, it’s not coming from a bad place and it’s not an absurd request either.
And yes, as you said, not allowing someone to wear a religious article of clothing is a lawsuit waiting to happen, which will be a slam dunk, but this isn’t the same.