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Comment by chickin | Hacker News Reader

No, I think he wants to ban a slogan on a work uniform. Much more limited scope.

Twitter is a product that is seen as a digital town square.

So Twitter, a private company with a well established and legally enshrined moderation policy is a public forum, but Tesla, run by a free speech activist and with no established dress code, isn’t. I look forward to see Elon clocking in and out and wearing appropriate work attire.

No, what was at issue was precisely their creation of a dress code:

> The NLRB's 3-2 decision went along party lines, with Republicans dissenting. The Democratic majority said it "found that it was unlawful for Tesla to maintain a policy requiring employees to wear a plain black T-shirt or one imprinted with the employer's logo, thus prohibiting employees from substituting a shirt bearing union insignia." Tesla's strict enforcement of the policy began in 2017, shortly after employees started wearing union shirts in a Fremont, California, factory.

They did not explicitly ban union insignia, they instituted a dress code.

This ^

Not choosing a side here, but the headline is super misleading.

The NLRB found that the dress code was a de facto ban on pro union shirts. The way the law is written (and decided), the dress code change is assumed to be an illegal de facto ban on pro-union shirts unless Tesla presents evidence that it was necessary for other reasons, which they were given an opportunity to do but failed to satisfy the majority-Democrat NLRB. I guess you only get so many characters in a headline.

Was the dress code instituted before or after people started wearing pro-union insignia?

Why does this matter? If your employees ever wanted to unionize, should that forbid you from ever instituting a new uniform requirement?

It matters because it gives an indication of whether the dress code is necessary for some reasonable reason (e.g. they want their employees to look nice) or because they were just suppressing unionisation.

The reason for doing something almost always has implications on the legality of you doing that thing. Since we don't have mindreading devices or truthtelling serum, judges use patterns and heuristics to make their best guess as to the reasons for actions.

“Tesla's strict enforcement of the policy began in 2017, shortly after employees started wearing union shirts in a Fremont, California, factory.”

He's pro-free speech so long as the speech isn't workers exercising their legal rights. =)

I don't see Twitter as a digital town square. I also don't see town squares as being a shouting arena.

It is enough of a digital town square that politicians from local all the way to federal make proclamations on it, as well as there being legal precedent prohibiting politicians from blocking their constituents.

To add more details, the legal precedent on this only says government accounts' posts and account pages are their own public-square-type place, not the entire Twitter service. Personal accounts when used for government-like purposes by government officials count too.

Federal what? The Russian federation? Also, why are people constantly attempting to compare a website to a square in a town?

(for those not reading between the lines: most of the world doesn't live in the US, and most of the world also doesn't assign special privilege to town squares, digital or otherwise)

The last bit of the second paragraph would of been a fine comment on its own without the snark.

That aside; this is an American website discussing an article about an American company having a ruling made against them by an American organization based on actions they took in America. I don't think the rest of the world is relevant to this discussion, and I don't think you do either.

Twitter is a mall. You can get kicked out of a mall and not be allowed back in.

I think of twitter as being a communal ball pit.

Metaphors considered harmful.

Which work uniform?

Last I've heard, the employment contract of the workers in question specified no such thing.

Care to elaborate?

Does Tesla even do actual employment contracts for factory workers? They're pretty rare for non-execs

Terms of work are outlined in the job offer.

In any case, we don't seem to be talking about a workplace with official uniforms. That was a red herring by the OP.

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