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.
You’re thinking like a person instead of a business. If you run a business you aren’t going to want your employees wearing whatever slogans/agendas/sayings they want that might upset customers. The workplace isn’t an advertisement center for whatever an employee wants. You aren’t allowed to work at target unless you’re wearing khakis and a plain red shirt. Your employer is allowed to keep a neutral tone and stay out of hot topics if they want to.
They’re taking sides either way. This decision says to me they’re taking the side of racists that don’t believe black lives matter.
Most companies advertise the support BLM, it’s just good marketing. Banning BLM is the opposite of this. It’s not a good business decisions. They’ve lost me as a customer, and I don’t think I’m all that special.
Not a good business move.
A lot of people don’t think that businesses should be allowed to control every element of their employees appearance. This is quite similar to a controversy in France when Euro Disneyland opened there and they had rules about how employees were allowed to have their hair and whether or not they could have piercings etc. In France and much of Europe it’s considered normal that an employee should have some bodily autonomy even if they’re in the work place, but Disney was an American company so to them their employees shouldn’t mind their employer exerting so much control over them.
Sure it’s probably in the businesses’ interest to make sure their employees all look a certain way, but to some that isn’t as important as employees being able to have agency over themselves and how they look.