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, but then I started thinking “why the hell do I think it’s so reasonable for a corporation to strip away the humanity of its employees” and I’m not sure where I’ve landed now.
They’re not doing anything if the sort, that’s hyperbolic nonsense. When you’re paid to represent a company, you shouldn’t be displaying items that link them to a course they’re not corporately linked to. Once you leave at the end of the shift you can put all the political regalia you like back on.
If no one is allowed to wear any flair then that’s fair. But everyone is allowed (and possibly encouraged?) to wear pride stuff in June as part of the anyway corporate rainbow-washing. So I have to ask why it’s OK to wear “LGBTQ+ folks deserve life and civil rights” stuff but it’s not OK to wear “Black folks deserve life and civil rights” stuff? Why is stating that Black lives have value so offensive that it’s worth fighting all the way to the Supreme Court to ban it?
It’s not just a corporate thing, police, military, and fire brigade aren’t allowed to wear overt political badging either.
There’s a general rule that if you work for an organisation which asks you to wear a work related uniform of some kind, you don’t get to add anything to it, political or otherwise. You don’t see bobbies with a Pink Floyd sticker on their chest.
“strip away the humanity”
I’m dead. That’s got to be the greatest use of hyperbole I’ve seen in a long time. Bravo, sir. Bravo.