Walmart violated its employees’ rights when it instituted a restrictive new dress code last year that union activists said was intended to prevent workers from wearing labor insignia on their clothes, a National Labor Relations Board administrative law judge has ruled. The judge ordered the retail giant to rescind the dress code at all of its stores.
The nation’s largest retailer had argued the policy was intended to prevent employees from wearing items with any logos, not just union ones, that would distract customers. The judge disagreed, saying the prohibition clearly violated the section of the National Labor Relations Act that allows workers to wear union insignia.
“The offending dress code language regarding logos is overly broad, is not justified by special circumstances and places unlawful restrictions on associates’ Section 7 right to wear union insignia,” said administrative law judge Geoffrey Carter in a ruling signed Thursday and made public Friday.
The ruling was a win for the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which had sued the retailer through its subsidiary activist group, Organization United for Respect at Walmart. The union has long sought to unionize Walmart, which is the largest employer in the U.S. with more than one million workers. The union has organized numerous protests against the company in recent years. A spokesman for the union could not be reached for comment.
“We are disappointed with the ruling and disagree with the findings. We are considering our options for the next steps in the legal process,” Walmart spokesman Brian Nick told the Washington Examiner.
Before 2014, Walmart’s official dress code permitted employees to wear “small, non-distracting” non-company logos and graphics on their clothes. Then, in September, Walmart altered the policy to prohibit any non-company logo larger than an employee name tag, which is 2.25 inches by 3.5 inches. UFCW, through OUR Walmart, made a complaint to the NLRB.
Walmart had argued that the dress code was used to prohibit all manner of distracting items. According to the judge’s ruling, these included: A handwritten message on an employee’s hand that read, “Stop, don’t shoot;” a three-inch-by-five-inch piece of paper with the inscription, “Comrade [name]. How may the Communist Party help you?;” and an “8.5–inch-by-11–inch piece of paper with a drawing of a cat roasting a marshmallow.”
The judge said that didn’t matter because any policy that would prohibit any union insignia had to be “narrowly tailored” to avoid violating employee rights and the burden was on the employer to prove the rule was necessary. Saying the insignia had to be smaller than the name tag did not meet that test.
