Whole Foods grocery chain bans Canadian employees from wearing poppies
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
Do I even need to say it? 2020 has laid bare this trust is very uneven in its distribution. I think that different levels of societal trust has had a large impact on the progression of the covid pandemic in different parts of different anglophone countries. I'm singling out anglophone countries, because I believe the levels of individual freedoms we enjoy mean that despite official mandates, our compliance with preventative measures was essentially an individual choice that reflected our faith in our fellow citizens, and the sincerity (though I would not go so far as to say competence) of our governments.
In Australia remembrance of past wars has been politicized, but I can still see a person wearing a poppy and see it as a sincere act. It hasn't yet become a symbol of partisan affiliation.
We still describe our preference for a political party with a layer of indirection as: I vote for X, rather than I am X
I hope this lasts.
EDIT: /u/reaperducer reads the article - pops conjecture bubble
We seem determined to piss it away, but none the less.
I spend ~0 time considering the quality or contents of the goods I purchase at my local grocer. There's some produce I avoid, but they aren't hiding the quality of what is sitting out.
What do you do if you aren't sure what is in a box?
edit: my local grocer is a bad example really. But I spend 0 time worrying about the quality of goods in pretty much any retail store...
I wear a poppy; I like seeing poppies; I definitely think it's something we should all be darn tootin' grateful for. It's a cultural event in Canada and embraced by virtually the entire population. You can get them everywhere you go and generally you can wear them everywhere you go. You certainly see them everywhere you go :).
But - I also have seen tons of businesses squeezed between rock and a hard place and PR and legislation and human rights and lawsuits and boycotts, because you genuinely cannot please everybody, and today it's easier than ever to find X number of people across the continent who are bothered by any given thing and give endless headache to the poor store manager who just wants to run a store. Sometimes it's just easier/safer to force the lowest common denominator and get with your business... except when it's not.
Problem is - anybody who starts a sentence with "It just makes sense that..." or "Everybody agrees that..." or "This is different because..." is empathically wrong. There empirically are people who think Poppies are political statement, there empirically are people who think their own statement is just as equal or more, and there are people who will claim, with fair amount of logic, that now we have government sponsoring / legislating one cause while forbidding others.
etc etc etc.
Reason #138492 I'm not running a public store/business these days.
Many people have a relative or loved one who died in combat.
I think the poppy, and Remembrance Day in general, spends far too little time examining _why_ these people were sent to die.
If Memorial Day was “celebrate the individual personal lives and accomplishments of all these people who died at war” then it’s apolitical. But that isn’t really how it goes unfortunately — I wish it did. Instead it’s about celebrating and glorifying our troops and our military which is super political.
How is it political - what party do you think it supports?
Partisan != political. (Though everything is in my opinion political.)
Without fail, all of them describe WWI as a stalwart selfless sacrifice for freedom and the motherland. Then I ask 'exactly what freedoms were at risk', and the authors of those posts start hemming and hawing and tut-tutting.
I wouldn't go as far as to claim that wearing a poppy is a statement for any of the possible interpretations of Remembrance day in particular, though.
- Carl von ClausewitzSo putting a photo of my dead wife on my desk at work glorifies car crashes? Got it.
Also, victims of car crashes aren't generally used in national pageantry aimed at causing more car crashes.
Are you comparing people fighting desperately for national survival, some of whom were conscripts and had no choice, to 'engaging in risk taking behavior' such as driving your car irresponsibly?
But this is exactly my problem with veterans rarara. It's totallizing where we should have razor sharp nuance.
How about on this day we just say 'it's sad anyone had to die, no matter which side they were on or how they ended up in that situation'? That's what a poppy is.
You can rephrase as 'it's sad anyone died, no matter which side they were on or how they ended up in that situation' if you find it confusing otherwise.
My main issue is I do not get the analogy. Those two things are very different to me.
How were Canadians aggressors in WW1 and WW2?
I think you're ignorant.
"I was basically told … if they allowed this one particular cause, then it would open up the door so that they would have to allow or consider allowing other causes," said the employee.
I haven't the foggiest.
But it's a fund-raising campaign run by a non-governmental entity. I don't think it's political or controversial. But most non-governmental fund-raising campaigns will also claim they are non-controversial and non-political, so why can't they get a uniform-code exception supported by provincial and federal prime minister?
>>Did Whole Foods make a political statement when they enacted the poppy ban?
I think Whole Foods have a uniform policy that says "wear no insignia other than these things", and as such it's as a-political as things can get these days.
In principle, making an exception for this one cause is formally the political statement.
As I said, I think it's a case of damned if you do damned if you don't. I happen to agree with this particular cause and am glad it's receiving support, but I don't necessarily know what objective differentiator we can write down, agree and use that would fit the poppy campaign but not million others.
No a poppy is not inherently part of a any fund-raising.
It's a symbol of remembrance.
You can buy poppies from anywhere, or make your own, and still be using it to remember.
You can't therefore buy remembrance poppies from anywhere - they pursue people who sell them and describe them as 'fraudulent', e.g. https://inews.co.uk/news/consumer/remembrance-day-2020-fake-...
It's been specifically trademarked to Royal Legion of Canada, and basically all the donation boxes you see in stores etc are from Royal Legion.
Again, nothing wrong with that, I support them, absolutely positively vast majority of Canadians do! But we also don't need to pretend it's not something that it legally and practically is.
If one may wear a pin to honor war dead, may one wear a pin for those that refused to fight?
So while this is being pitched as 'WF won't allow employees to do X', it may be more accurate to say 'Amazon won't allow WF employees to do X'.
Sorry, off topic but when there's a remote chance to slip in an Office Space reference I am obligated to do so.
Bet Amazon is hoping that the Daily Mail or a UK MP doesn't pick this up - not going to help with lobbying against the revenue tax that.
Many of those who are complaining about freedom of speech now were pretty quiet when the policy first rolled out.
This sort of thing often happens when American companies operate outside of America and forget that cultural differences can be pretty significant.
The very idea of banning a Canadian from wearing a poppy during November is, to my Canadian-culturally-raised-brain, an insane thought. Doug Ford said he would pass a law that made banning them illegal and honestly I suspect he'd get unanimous support from his legislature, most of whom loathe him.
You can't just apply American norms everywhere.
According to the article, it was one Canadian employee told by one Canadian supervisor that this was a no-go. There was no "Poppies is bad!" memo from Austin or Seattle. It was how a single Canadian manager chose to interpret the dress code.
In other words, if it wasn't for the internet outrage industry, this would be much ado about nothing.
Further along in the article it shows the problem is provincial law, not the policy of an American company:
Wearing a poppy could be considered a display of a political belief, according to employment lawyer Alex Lucifero with the firm Samfiru Tumarkin, and thus, would not be protected under the Human Rights Code in Ontario.
This is egregious cherry-picking from the article. While one sentence says "An employee of the Whole Foods in Ottawa says", the previous paragraph says "U.S.-based Whole Foods Market says poppies aren't allowed [...] which affects employees at its 14 locations across Canada", and the one before that (the first in the article) says "a national grocery store chain has banned its employees from wearing the symbol of remembrance". Later, the article says "A poppy does not comply with that policy, the company confirmed", referring to Whole Foods, not any specific location. The sentence that you're quoting, read with any context whatsoever, is clearly anecdotal evidence provided to support the claim that Whole Foods both has a policy against wearing poppies, and is enforcing that policy in at least one store.
> Further along in the article it shows the problem is provincial law
I don't know what the hell you're going on about here. "would not be protected" is vastly different from "is not permitted". This sentence merely clarifies that Whole Foods' action is not explicitly illegal, not that it is required under any law.
In the follow-up article [0] which is framed as "Whole Foods reverse their ban" they do actually have a quote from a spokesperson who says "Our intention was never to single out the poppy or to suggest a lack of support for Remembrance Day". So if they didn't single out Poppies was this just a blanket ban on all "cause/political" adjustments to uniform that Poppies were included in (because a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of simple minds)? Or did they send out an email to all staff saying "Don't wear a Poppy because we hate our nation's war dead and their sacrifice" but thanks to the righteous fury of the Canadian people and Christians in general they've been defeated. Or more likely some awkward position in the middle? The context really matters.
Clearly this is a non-story either way but it's a classic example of events being given without sufficient context and intended to generate outrage (4k comments and counting on the news site). Later people will remember that time when Whole Foods banned Poppies and it took a massive campaign to get them to change their mind...11 hours later.
Big companies do sometimes double down on seemingly unpopular policies in these kinds of cases (British Airways were sued and lost in the European Court of Human Rights because they penalised a Christian woman who refused to cover up religious jewellery [1]) but that's the exception. Mostly the policy (if it ever existed) is quietly amended or reinterpreted.
0 - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/whole-foods-poppies-al... 1 - https://www.bailii.org/eu/cases/ECHR/2013/37.html
That is, as I read it, merely saying that the provincial law allows them to ban wearing it not that it requires them to ban it. So the issue is very much with the company and not with the law unless you're saying that we're only allowed to complain about things that are illegal?
I don't know if the poppy is a thing in the US so this might have been a case of US head office not understanding that to the vast majority of people the poppy is not a political statement.
i think that is our common loss. I mean after probable initial period of discomfort for some, it would be of great benefit to everybody to naturally get used to our differences and to see that say a maga wearer can be a great guy and coworker what you can talk with and not some stupid redneck from backwoods, and pride wearer is also a normal person like you, not just some perverted servant of Satan. It is kind of socialization in puppy training, and it looks like our polarized society is in great need of such socialization.
You could argue that Canada's participation (and bloody losses) in WW1 and WW2 unified Canada into a nation, beyond the welfare subsidies that made confederation.
Britain very heavily relied on its colonies during those wars, even more than is commonly known. Besides personnel, Canada built several airstrips to train pilots from multiple countries.