A judge has ruled in favor of The Home Depot after the retail giant banned employees from wearing Black Lives Matter imagery while at work.
Administrative Law Judge Paul Bogas on Friday rejected a complaint from the National Labor Relations Board, which accused the company of violating workers' rights by barring them from displaying BLM logos and slogans on their clothing or signature orange aprons.
In his decision, Bogas wrote that that BLM messaging did not have "an objective, and sufficiently direct, relationship to terms and conditions of employment" to be legally protected.
"The BLM messaging originated, and is primarily used, to address the unjustified killings of black individuals by law enforcement and vigilantes," Bogas wrote. "To the extent the message is being used for reasons beyond that, it operates as a political umbrella for societal concerns and relates to the workplace only in the sense that workplaces are part of society."
The complaint was initially filed in March 2021 by an employee at a Home Depot store located just outside Minneapolis, Minnesota, where George Floyd was murdered by police in May 2020 in an act that sparked the BML movement. Worker Antonio Morales claimed he was suspended for having the phrase on his uniform and later resigned over the issue.
The National Labor Relations Board joined the case August 2021, according to NPR. Its lawyers argued that the company's uniform policy, which bans political or religious messages "unrelated to workplace matters," should not apply to the BLM movement, and that workers were within their rights to display BLM imagery with the goal of improving their working conditions.
Lawyers further alleged that Morales was required to "choose between engaging in protected concerted activity, including displaying the BLM slogan, and quitting employment."
Bogas, however, ruled that lawyers did not support their arguments.
"In the more than 30 years since the Board held that a subject might be considered 'inherently concerted' it has granted that status to only three subjects – wages, work schedules, and job security. As the General Counsel recognizes, none of those three 'inherently concerted' subjects bear on the circumstances present here," Bogas wrote in his ruling.
Home Depot did not respond to the ruling. In a statement to Business Insider last August, the company denied any wrongdoing.
"The Home Depot does not tolerate workplace harassment of any kind and takes all reports of discrimination or harassment seriously, as we did in this case," the statement said.
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