The case is about the right of grocery chain Whole Foods Market to impose a dress code that prevents its employees, on the company’s property, from wearing anything with a political or ideological slogan such as “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) or “Make America Great Again” (MAGA). The dress code requires clothing and related items (masks, pins, buttons, and such) to be “without any visible symbol, flag, slogan, message, logo or advertising.”
Some employees in a dozen stores across the country refused to remove their BLM apparel, making them subject to disciplinary measures. Many apparently left the company instead of complying. Some complained to the NLRB, claiming they were “engaged in concerted activities for the purposes of mutual aid and protection by raising concerns about working conditions, including by wearing Black Lives Matter messaging at work.” By prohibiting that, they claimed, Whole Foods violated the 1935 National Labor Relations Act.
By the time you read this article, the “trial” should have been held under an NLRB administrative judge. As typical of powerful regulators, the NLRB is both the prosecutor and the judge.
Avoiding constant conflict / Elizabeth Nolan Brown, who reported on the issue in Reason, noted that a ruling for the plaintiffs could result in a special carve‐out for BLM while allowing employers to continue prohibiting other political and ideological slogans. Or, “alternately, it could allow any type of political messaging, but something tells me supporters of the staff wearing BLM gear wouldn’t be so happy to buy groceries from a guy in a MAGA mask,” she notes. Why stop there? Imagine that store customers were greeted with “Let’s go Brandon!” or a proclamation that “Fetal Lives Matter,” “Blue Lives Matter,” or some other political opinion.
In a previous suit over the same dress code provision, Whole Foods employees claimed that preventing them from proselytizing for BLM was discriminatory on the basis of race. Last year, U.S. District Court Judge Allison Burroughs ruled against that claim, noting that “there is no right to free speech in a private workplace.”
Both cases are ultimately about property rights, whose function is precisely to avoid constant conflicts in society, to prevent individuals from continuously bumping into each other. The employee decides which political opinions, if any, will be advertised in his apartment, house, or car; the employer decides which opinions, if any, will be advertised on its property. Either of them is free to rent spaces or airtime or to demonstrate with the hope of persuading others to adopt their political ideas. Private property is necessary for economic freedom and individual liberty.
Putting customers first, as Whole Foods and its owner Amazon aim to do, is a formula that has been proven to foster prosperity and individual liberty. Putting workers first &— well, that didn’t work out too well in the old Soviet Union.
Brave new world / The incoherence of many activists and ideologues on the right and left has been noted. Some on the left want Whole Foods to let its employees promote political causes (at least the correct ones) in its stores, but they deny the right of the owners of social media platforms to let opinions (at least the wrong ones) be expressed freely. Some on the right presumably want Whole Foods to prevent political speech (at least the wrong sort) in its stores, but they don’t want social media to “censor” certain opinions (of people on their side). Welcome to the jungle. (See “Facebook: Like Corporation, Like Whistleblower,” Winter 2021–2022.)
The NLRB action against Whole Foods surfs on a tidal wave of corporate politicization. Bullied by activists and ivory‐tower academics, suppliers and especially large corporations are supposed to embrace “woke” or other political fads. Large corporations subject their philosophically diversified clienteles to advertising messages that are, for some of the customers, annoying, insulting, or even hateful. As former diplomat Dave Seminara wrote in the Wall Street Journal:
When I look around my house, I see many products from woke companies that want me to know how strongly they disagree with me on pretty much every issue of the day. … It doesn’t seem like too much to ask that the businesses I patronize refrain from actively and loudly despising me.
On today’s ideological scene, as the Whole Foods case illustrates, we encounter strange characters who seem focused on creating a dystopia where activists of identity groups and certain political causes have rights that others don’t have. Is their implicit model the benevolent dictatorship of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 Brave New World? One of the novel’s characters repeats the naïve observation of Miranda in Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “O brave new world, that has such people in it!” More to the point is the view of another of the novel’s characters, Lenina. “After all,” she says, “everyone belongs to everyone else.”
