REPORT: Whole Foods Battles The Biden Admin Over Being Forced To Permit Employees To Wear BLM Gear 

There is a little-known irony about the vegan supermarket chain Whole Foods.

Writing in The New York Times in February 2020, David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report noted that Whole Foods stores were one of the strongest anchors of liberal political thought. During the 2016 election, he noted, within a one-mile “bubble” of a Whole Foods store, support for Democrats outpaced that of Republicans by 48 points. Even within 10 miles, Democrats were still plus-27.

Yet what many of those liberals may not know is that Whole Foods CEO and founder John Mackey, who is set to retire this year, is a vicious free market capitalist, a staunch member of the Libertarian Party, and strongly anti-union.

And now, even though Mackey sold the company to Amazon, Whole Foods is showing its Mackey-like streak in fighting the federal government over political sloganeering.

According to a recent Bloomberg News report, prosecutors from the federal National Labor Relations Board, which has tilted dramatically to the left since President Joe Biden took office, is going after Whole Foods for banning employees from wearing Black Lives Matter gear while on the job.

The NLRB claims Whole Foods violated federal law when it “interfered with employees’ rights under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act to engage ‘in concerted activities for their mutual aid and protection,’” Bloomberg reported.

The agency’s left-wing general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, a Biden appointee, maintained that the company cannot prohibit BLM insignia on face masks and other clothing because “racial justice advocacy” by Whole Foods workers “falls squarely within the scope of what she called the ‘group action to improve their lot as employees,’” Bloomberg reported.

“The employer certainly can control whether people of color get harassed and discriminated against at their workplace,” Abruzzo told Bloomberg in an interview. Yet Workers, she added, can respond, “We’re about a broader movement. But that broader movement flows into our smaller workplace universe.”

Whole Foods asserts the NLRB’s demands are unconstitutional and actually violate the company’s First Amendment rights.

The company maintains that it prohibits all commentary that is unrelated to work on its employees’ clothing.

Abruzzo, Whole Foods counters, seeks to “compel” the company to adopt a form of speech that the government deems acceptable. As Bloomberg noted, “The upscale grocer also accuses her [Abruzzo] of ‘unlawfully infringing upon and/or diluting WFM’s protected trademarks’ by trying to mandate that it allow the display of a ‘political message in conjunction with’ its trademarked uniforms and logos.”

Continuing, Bloomberg reported: “Whole Foods contends that Section 7 of the NLRA, which protects employees’ right to take collective action related to working conditions, doesn’t extend to workers’ BLM messages, which it calls ‘political and/or social justice speech.’ The company’s filing argues that ‘BLM’ and related phrases ‘are not objectively understood to relate to workplace issues or improving working conditions at WFM’s retail grocery stores’ or employment terms and conditions in general.”

“Employees do not have a protected right under Section 7 of the Act to display the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter’ or ‘BLM’ in the workplace,” the company’s lawyers wrote in a filing with the NLRB.

The case goes to trial in March. 

The upshot, of course, is that it’s arguable the federal government could force any company to promote any cause the government likes but the firm may disagree with, if the NLRB succeeds.

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