A National Labor Relations Board judge has ruled to dismiss a case filed by a Home Depot employee who alleged the company wrongly banned workers from wearing the Black Lives Matter slogan on their aprons.
An employee at a Minnesota store first filed a complaint against the home improvement company in March 2021, after allegedly being suspended, and later resigning, for having the phrase on their uniform.
NLRB lawyers became involved in August 2021, arguing that Black Lives Matter should not fall under The Home Depot's uniform policy, which bans political or religious messages "unrelated to workplace matters" from employees' aprons, or elsewhere on their clothing.
The employee was "required to choose between engaging in protected concerted activity, including displaying the 'BLM' slogan, and quitting employment," the complaint said.
The NLRB defines concerted activity as any action taken with coworkers in an effort to improve working conditions, including talking with coworkers about earnings, petitioning for more hours and speaking with media or government agencies about workplace issues.
Lawyers representing the former Home Depot employee did not argue whether BLM was political messaging, but rather that not allowing employees to display the slogan on their aprons interfered with their right to concerted activity.
NLRB Judge Paul Bogas wrote in his opinion that the plaintiffs had not sufficiently...
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