Whole Foods’ Battle Against Black Lives Matter Masks Has Much Higher Stakes
Jennifer Abruzzo, general counsel at the NLRB, is seeking a ruling that would give US workers something more like free speech.
In June 2020, the week after a police officer murdered George Floyd, Jeff Bezos endorsed Black Lives Matter. “I support this movement,” Bezos replied via email to a customer who’d complained about seeing a BLM banner on Amazon.com. A couple of days later, when Bezos received a fresh complaint that included a racist slur, he raised his commitment. “You’re the kind of customer I’m happy to lose,” he said. He posted the exchanges on Instagram, where each drew hundreds of thousands of likes. So it was strange that, at about the same time, store managers at Amazon-owned Whole Foods Market began telling workers not to wear clothes with BLM slogans, and punishing those who did.
Among the first sent home for wearing BLM apparel were two Black employees at a Whole Foods in New Hampshire. Savannah Kinzer, a White employee at a Massachusetts store a mile from Harvard Square, says she and her co-workers thought some managers just hadn’t gotten the memo. “We were like, ‘Oh, Whole Foods is confused,’ ” she says.