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.
Whole Foods is not the business it used to be. Not even close. Any semblance of what that store was when it was privately owned is gone.
spoiler: it’s still privately owned
I’m guessing what you’re getting at is publicly traded != publicly owned. If so yeah, very true. Furthermore privately owned can be just as bad as publicly traded. My company was publicly traded, but the CEO and largest shareholder was the founder. He wasn’t terrible as far as capitalist owners go (yeah that’s some “master ain’t so bad” shit, but still…). We got bought by some literal Nazi heirs though and it’s been hell since.
publicly traded is privately owned - buying common stock doesn’t give the public, most of whom are too poor to afford said stock, meaningful control over the business. the stock owning class have interests that directly contradict those of workers (ie the vast, vast majority of us).