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.
Honesty, imo, shame on Amazon for not barring anything but solid-colored, patterned, or Bezos-Empire-Branded masks, explicitly, in their dress code.
I’m a (mostly) vegan, liberal AF, solidly middle-class, homeowner married millenial parent (i.e the portrait of a Whole Foods customer), and I agree with BLM, but I would be put off by any political or politicalized messaging in a supplier/customer relationship. I’m here for your general tao seitan and a TTLA…not for your influence.
bro you’re absolutely right bro the status quo isn’t political
“ Ask yourself: is there something sinister in moralism? And then answer: no. God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth.”
Just consume product, get excited for next product, and assure yourself that you are smarter than both sides.
So you don’t agree with BLM then
Believe it or not it is possible to fully support a political ideal while still thinking corporations should stay out of politics.
For example, I think that cops taking money from people (Civil Asset Forfeiture) without charging them with a crime is amoral, unconstitutional (4th amendment), and un-American.
If, however, I saw a sign about it in my local McDonald’s I would definitely be like WTF?!?
It’s not “Black Lives Matter After Business Hours”
If you don’t believe black lives matter all the time, then you don’t believe black lives matter at all
Yeah, I tried that line on my youth pastor when I young zealous member of a church. His response didn’t make me happy, but did give me the opportunity to look at how others saw my actions.
Of course his version was about my cross necklace that wasn’t allowed at work (no jewelry at all) and Christ’s love.
The simple fact is that more often than not, you will have a bigger impact on those around you when you show them that black lives matter with your actions, rather than by wearing a BLM patch. The people around you have seen a BLM patch and already formed an opinion about what it means. Many people that need to see and hear the message the most will turn their brains off as soon as they see the logo.
politics? in my treats?
liberalism.txt
Death to America
Saying that black people exist and should remain alive is not a political statement. Do you want to ban hats that say “veteran” too? Or maybe charity and cancer awareness logos?
Being a live black person is not a political act. Think about that when ordering some seitan and being “liberal AF”, whatever that means.
This feels very similar to me to businesses freaking out and trying to prevent their employees from wearing rainbow flag or pronoun pins. Or rainbow masks, for that matter.
I think employee uniform requirements should be just enough to make employees identifiable so they can do their jobs (e.g. answer customer questions about where the lettuce is or whatever). Just a mandatory hat or shirt is enough to do that. Beyond that, they’re humans. Let them be fucking humans.
I don’t know if you really don’t know the difference between being black and supporting the BLM movement, but there is a definite difference. A good quick measure is would a politician hold an opinion on it? For a specific example do you think Tim Scott (one of the black Republican Presidential Candidates) would wear a BLM face mask?
I will assume that you are arguing and good faith and genuinely don’t see the difference, so here are a few contrasting examples:
Wearing a hat that says Veteran is a statement of fact, like wearing a hat with your college’s logo. It is not inherently political or supporting any particular political ideal.
Wearing a VFW hat on the other hand, would be political. The VFW seeks to educated and change the opinions of legislators regarding veterans.
If a black person was wearing a hat that said I am Black. That would be a statement of fact and not inherently political or supporting any particular political ideal.
Wearing a BLM hat on the other hand would be political. The BLM organization and supporters of the BLM ideals seek to educate and change the opinions of legislators and the public regarding black people.
Without typing out the same comparisons again, cancer awareness and most charities would fall under political ideals also. They almost always seek to influence government legislation or funding.
It’s absolutely political because it sits on the false premise that others argue otherwise. Nobody does, it’s a false premise used to create racial divide and lower the moral of the black community
you could have left this description out and we would still know this about you from this bootlicker take
Politics are everywhere. You cannot (and don’t deserve to) escape them, brunch gremlin. Ooga-booga-booga.
😤
It’s almost like this a system of some kind. And maybe racist? A racist system? So not only aren’t we doing enough to take on systemic racism, corporations like Amazon are creating new forms of systemic racism.
stunning satire
How Cool And Liberal and definitely not two faced. So while black people begin to avoid Whole Foods, you’ll still be shopping there because its not a problem for you. And as a good liberal of course, you agree there’s no reason people can state “black lives matter to me” on their clothes. Sure, in the privacy of your own property but not in Massa’s house. Bezo’s free speech quashes the protections of the speech of his lessers and… that is simply the law. You’re relieved of guilt.
You know, I’m not a tankie, but the self deluding, boot licking, and casual racist assumptions about whose lives are “political statements” based on their lamenting of being constantly murdered and stepped on by society, do give me a sympathetic window into their specific disgust of neoliberals. People like you go along to get along and nothing more.
You’re quite fine with racism because Whole Foods is cheap.
But this is specifically about workers wearing a BLM mask. Not the general public.
Amazon/Wholefoods are totally within their rights as employers to enforce a dress code. That’s it. That’s the end of the line.
Now, if they had previously let workers wear “FJB” masks without enforcing the dress code, that’s obviously a bias and something that should be dealt with.
This is, quite obviously, a worker violating a dress code and seeking publicity by riding the coattails of a heated issue with their own persecution complex.
If Amazon has a dress code, either it allows for a degree of self expression or it does not. The move to ban political messaging in the workplace doesn’t apply to the mere statement “black lives matter”. Black Lives Matter was a social movement and its name was informal and de-facto. There is an activist organization Black Lives Matter that claims (to my knowledge) a limited ownership of white-on-black “#Black Lives Matter” but the phrase itself doesn’t have a PO box, it doesn’t make political contributions. It is a value statement that one believes black human beings have inherent value. So to cede that the English phrase “black lives matter” is political assumes that the default LEGAL and POLITICAL viewpoint is that they do not, which is the terrifying, unspoken, yet not codified by law, truth underlying half of the America justice system. When you make the argument that Amazon has the right to ban such a phrase from clothing on political grounds you and Amazon are both admitting that you believe black lives in a general sense have no value and you’re willing to take it to court, because that is where this is probably going.
Are we really thinking that anyone at Amazon who matters actually believes that? Believes that this fundamental values conflict of American access to protected speech would actually resolve in a way that decidedly points to black lives having no worth as a legally upheld opinion in America? Really that is neither here nor there, we’re watching a version of this fascist semantics argument about free speech play out with minor or medium consequences all over the internet. This sort of move will curry some favor with racist culture warrior consumers and businesses, but it is about clamping down on employee rights to communicate symbolically at all. If the color chartreuse was a meme amongst unionists and union proponents, Amazon would do the same thing. On one side of the coin they are making a concession toward a racist status quo and on the other they are saying that the SCOTUS ruling they cite allows them to ban symbols in the workplace.
It isn’t good to shop at Whole Foods with this knowledge in the back of your brain. We will now, if you want, employ the thought terminating cliche that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, and this is almost always true. However Amazon should not be allowed to target symbolic expression like this without a dress code saying “our employees wear an apron with the Amazon smile on it and a grey, breathable jumpsuit underneath”. There are workplaces like this with dress codes where this isn’t an issue. You are seeing Amazon casually admit it controls the symbolic language of the workplace entirely if it suits their agendas. Legality is not universal truth, especially when the Supreme Court has been arranged to flagrantly serve the interests of the business class. So there’s one argument for why people should get to wear chartreuse colored shirts that say whatever the fuck they want but hate speech.
I lost this typing it the first time and my second try wasn’t as good. I don’t care if you have a bunch of holes and flaws in my arguments to point out, I will quietly read them and appreciate them, but I will maintain you’re arguing for something racist and unethical either way unless it’s a really good argument. IE you’re not going to get me to say “gee you are right” by drawing similarities to Twitter cancellations over bad words and deplatforming of conservatives for speech that would get them punched in the nose in a public venue. In life, it is impossible to avoid political ideas, and even more impossible to avoid the techniques for propagating memetic formatted ideas like ads for conflict diamonds or unwell street preachers screaming the good word. You should buy your seitan somewhere that isn’t trafficking with fascist pseudolegal interpretations of free speech so they can control their employees by betting that a spineless lower court will uphold a directly evil SCOTUS ruling.
That idea has no bearing on reality, you likely support many businesses owned by right wing assholes indirectly just by living somewhere that doesn’t use 100% renewable energy for all of its power needs, for example, and so do I, you can’t really help it. Corporations are people under US law and they have been doing political speech under that regime in the form of unlimited spending for over a decade. If Amazon actually believes that black lives matter they should indeed say it. False neutrality and saying that black lives matter is too political a stance for them to want to take is a stance in itself.