The Dress Code Isn't Racist. It's A Good Business Practice.

Good for Amazon and Whole Foods:

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought against Whole Foods by three former employees who alleged the Amazon-owned grocery chain unlawfully fired them for wearing Black Lives Matter masks.

Massachusetts District Judge Allison Burroughs, an Obama appointee, granted summary judgment in favor of Whole Foods on Monday, finding there was no evidence Whole Foods used its dress code policy as a pretext to discriminate against the three fired employees...

Whole Foods faced walkouts and protests in 2020 for forbidding workers to wear masks with Black Lives Matter written on them in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. 

The three employees represented in the lawsuit sued after they were fired for violating the dress code policy.

The judge has to let us know that she doesn't think Whole Foods' decision was a good one, just that it wasn't illegal:

"The record, at most, reflects a series of arguably ill-advised business decisions by Whole Foods in light of Plaintiffs’ dress code violations and the message they sought to display, but it is not one from which a jury could conclude that Whole Foods’ legitimate reasons for firing them were ‘shams’ concocted to punish them for protesting its strict enforcement of the dress code," Burroughs wrote.

She further ruled that the plaintiffs had failed to show how a similarly situated employee who had violated the dress code policy was treated differently than the employees fired for wearing BLM masks. 

"The evidence demonstrates only that Whole Foods did not strenuously enforce the dress code policy until mid-2020, and that when it increased enforcement, it did so uniformly," the judge found.