Whole Foods strikes me as a sort of high-priced white, liberal, yuppiesh place. There won’t be too many offended by a BLM shirt. Wear a MAGA shirt and you will probably hear about it.
It’s really important that workers have no power, though. That’s clear these days.
In 2020, the then-Prime Minister of Australia appointed himself as minister for finance, health, and resources. (In American terms, think of it as a president naming himself the secretary of Treasury, Health and Human Services, and Interior.)
Which is unusual, but apparently not illegal. What’s really weird is the fact that he did it without telling the public - or the people then serving in those positions. So they were walking around thinking, “I am the minister of finance” when in fact their boss had commandeered their position without telling them.
(Edit: apparently the health minister knew, but not the others.)
Would you be okay if workers at Whole Foods (or any other grocery chain) wore MAGA stuff prominently while on the job? I support the right of those workers, when they’re on their own time, to wear BLM or MAGA stuff. Heck, they can do it standing on the street right in front of the store, but I don’t think it’s wrong for the company to make it a condition of employment for them not to do it on the job.
This line of reasoning is incompatible with the statement put out, which specifically cites that BLM is unacceptable because it’s a “symbol of hate” associated with “violence and looting” which will make their stores “unsafe.” That’s not a statement about a general policy against political stuff, it’s a very targeted prohibition by an overtly racist fuckwit.
Dejin
1820
Their outgoing CEO seems like a real piece of work:
On the flipside there’s this (from his Wikipedia article)
You can find some random fuckwit that says anything. Again, do you want to go grocery shopping at a place where the employees are stocking apples while decked out in MAGA gear? If the answer is no, then the same applies to BLM gear. Heck, even if you’re okay with it, do you dispute the right of employers to determine that their employees shouldn’t be decked out in political charged gear (from either end of the spectrum) while they’re on the job?
ShivaX
1822
Their CEO says politically charged shit all the time.
If he wants to divest Whole Foods from politics he can start by resigning.
They aren’t banning political speech overall. They’re banning BLM specifically.
Also comparing BLM to MAGA is… a stretch anyway.
Also, also from 2020:
Company policy prohibits employees from wearing clothing with any political or brand logo, a Whole Foods spokesperson told Berkeleyside last week. The lawsuit contends that the company may have that policy but routinely ignored it and let people wear clothing with rainbows and LGBTQ slogans.
“Whole Foods has not enforced its dress code policy that it now claims justifies its actions, and it has allowed employees to wear other messages, including political messages and support for LGBTQ+ employees, without repercussion,” reads the request for an injunction. “Only when employees began organizing to wear Black Lives Matter masks in the workplace did Whole Foods begin to enforce its nominal dress code policy in earnest.”
“Racism has no place here, but we’re not political so take off your anti-racism stuff.”
Whole Foods is trying to have their cake, eat it and also sell it while their CEO spouts conspiracy theories.
Political speech was fine for literally years until it was “don’t murder black people,” then suddenly it’s not allowed and also “dangerous”.
Fuck them.
This is an interesting problem for a lot of reasons. One is the challenge of equivalency. Is all political speech the same? It seems logical on the surface to support banning political expressions on company property during retail operations and interactions with customers. If you construct that broadly to include pretty much wearing anything that isn’t part of a de facto uniform, you can make the argument work, if it is limited to say clothing and accessories, that sort of stuff.
If you are not rocking a full-on uniform policy though, and are making case by case determinations, things get more interesting. Clearly BLM and MAGA are not the same; anyone who equates the two is falling deeply into a both side-ism sort of trap. That though is hard for us to deal with in a culture built around the mythology of every political viewpoint being equally valid at some fundamental level. We glorify freedom of expression even, or especially, when we disagree with what is being expressed. Or we convince ourselves of that, but really, it only is true as long as that Overton window is in the right place. We’ve never, ever, actually believed all expressions are equal.
But it is very very hard for institutions and organizations to flat-out admit that X is acceptable and Y is not, because fundamentally all organizations–especially corporations–are viciously conservative, even reactionary. Far better to hunker down and try not to piss off anyone than to actually have a coherent POV or stand for anything in particular. From a financial POV this probably makes sense, on paper at least; if you are selling widgets no one gives a rat’s ass what your views on fracking might be, they just want cheap widgets. And big organizations often have diverse workforces and diverse customer bases, and making a stand for anything is risky.
The thing that gets me is not that a fundamentally conservative entity is going to be risk-averse, and amoral, but that they won’t admit it. The argument that Trump (!) said BLM was a hate group is so far beyond the pale of logic, humanity, or reason that it boggles the mind. If Whole Foods just said “no political expression period; even though we support cause X and cause Y (points to donations, whatever), our stores are for buying radishes and arugula, not discussing politics,” it might actually be a non-story.
He’s the CEO.
I get what you’re saying about politically charged apparel in the workplace and I agree with you in a broad sense that employers have a right to set standards of professional dress and conduct but that conversation is not relevant to this case. If he’d been cagier about his racism that’s how he could have couched it and no one would have batted an eye, but he said the quiet parts loud.
KevinC
1825
Yeah, I don’t think CEO of the company in question can be qualified as “some random fuckwit”.
He’s retiring on September 1st (which presumably why he feels free to go into full “old man yells at cloud” mode.)
And if the media did their job properly no one would ever hear another single word out of this idiots cakehole from September onward.
Anyone care to take a wager whether that happens? Yeah, me neither.
I might have missed it, but did the CEO say it? The quote above was some random lawyer for Whole Foods. On the general principle of an employer’s right to regulate political dress code not being relevant to this case, I disagree.
If another CEO/employer said “you can’t wear MAGA gear on the job because Trump promotes hate”, that’s not okay? Political affiliation is not a protected class. A CEO can fire you (assuming at will employment) for wearing MAGA or BLM clothes or for liking cats. If it can be shown that the BLM thing is a proxy for firing someone for being Black, that is a different story. I didn’t think that was the case, here.
KevinC
1829
I disagree with putting Black Lives Matter and MAGA in the same bucket. A “Fuck 45” and a MAGA hat I’d put in the same category, not BLM.
I’m sure you and many others (including me) do. But that’s not how we decide rights.
The right of the employer to fire people for things falling into non-protected classes isn’t the question. We all know that is how it is, though there’s a good case to be made that we as a society might want to rethink the entire premise that ownership of capital gives you primacy over pretty much everything else.
This is a case of should rather than can. Essentially a company can take one of two honest approaches to this question. They can either have a blanket policy excluding any non-work related speech on the job, or they can endorse the expression of certain views and prohibit the expression of others. The former is much safer, and closer to what many folks would assume should be the norm. The latter though is fine, as long as it is open and honest. Right-wing operations like Chik-fil-A and Hobby Lobby seem to have zero problems laying out an ideological slant, not to mention religious groups and all. Most companies though see it more as not wanting to piss off potential customers. Which is fine, again, as long as their actions are across the board. In this case, the mere fact they gave a reason why BLM in particular was unacceptable is what is the problem.
Had they simply prohibited all political expression on clothing, say, or had they formally announced they were a right-wing fascist subsidiary and would henceforth allow only KKK-endorsed messages, then, sure, knock BLM all you want. But they want the best of both worlds. They want to be seen as enlightened and they want to avoid pissing off rich fascists.
The problem is one of perception. Black Lives Matter and Make America Great Again are supposed to be statements in support of police reform and Donald Trump for president. The problem is how those messages of support have been (often purposefully) corrupted into symbols or messages of hate. That’s not how it’s supposed to work.
I blame Donald Trump. I blame Fox News and the right wing media in general. I blame Trump voters who display the hat as a Fuck You provocation. I also don’t care for the folks looting and rioting on the fringes of the mostly-peaceful BLM protests.
Do we have any indication that they have allowed employees to go around wearing MAGA gear while not allowing BLM stuff? But ultimately, as you say, this is a PR issue, not a rights issue. I don’t think it’s a good move, but I support their right to do it (at whatever business cost they might pay for it).
Yeah, that’s it, pretty much. As consumers we can choose to patronize them or not, but under our current laws they aren’t doing anything illegal. Stupid, perhaps, but not illegal.
My bad, I thought it said “Hole Foods”
