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.

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.

  • Blake [he/him]@feddit.uk
    27·
    1 year ago

    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?

    • serial_crusher@lemmy.basedcount.com
      14·
      1 year ago

      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 plaintiffs were told they had to remove their Black Lives Matter face masks because they violated the dress code, but the workers refused and were sent home. After being sent home several times, they were fired for violating the company’s attendance policy.

      • Blake [he/him]@feddit.uk
        8·
        1 year ago

        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

    • serial_crusher@lemmy.basedcount.com
      8·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Blake [he/him]@feddit.uk
        3·
        1 year ago

        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.