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.
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.