Milford Whole Food Sent Workers Home Over Anti-Racism Slogan

MILFORD, CT — "Racism has no place here." The slogan, adopted by Whole Foods in the aftermath of protests over police brutality and the death of George Floyd, is featured on the landing page of the organic grocery's website. The same message appears on digital billboards located at the store entrances, including the location in the Milford Marketplace shopping center.

But when Graham Johnson sees those words on her way into work, the message reads differently.

"It's disingenuous," says Johnson, who was among some dozen employees who showed up to work on July 4 wearing t-shirts printed with the same five-word message.

That day, multiple employees were sent home for violating Whole Food's dress code, Patch has confirmed, including Johnson, who has worked there for about two years.

According to Johnson, the idea for the shirts arose after an employee chose to go home rather than remove a Black Lives Matter mask. (According to a second Whole Foods employee who asked not to be named out of fear of retaliation, the incident had led a store manager to convene a "huddle" of employees, during which he advised that allowing Black Lives Matter masks would "open the door" to the wearing of Nazi or Confederate imagery.)

As frustration built, Johnson says a group of employees formed a Facebook group to discuss how to respond — and they landed on adapting the company's own declaration.

"We thought it was genius, how could they possibly get mad at their own slogan?" she recalls. "On the day we all chose to wear the shirts, there were 12 or 15 of us that ended up getting sent home for dress code violations, which was obviously very upsetting."

She adds, "We didn't feel it was fair to punish us just for expressing beliefs the company itself claims to back."

Later that day, Johnson tweeted a photo of the shirt, the Whole Foods' website and the digital billboard at the entrance to the store, all proclaiming "racism has no place here."

Since Saturday, Johnson's tweet has been shared more than 29,000 times, catapulting the Milford store into the national trend of similar employee protests underway at Whole Foods locations in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Seattle, and Philadelphia.

"It's all a little surreal," Johnson says of the attention, adding that she's heard from Whole Foods employees across the U.S. and Canada facing their own in-store conflicts over the extent to which Whole Foods employees are restricted from echoing their employer's public stance against racism.

"I never expected this sort of response, but I'm glad it happened," she says. "It felt good to be having these conversations, and to know we're not alone."

That the protest took place on Independence Day added to the resonance to the event, Johnson says, though she claims the group hadn't specifically targeted the date. Rather, it was "a stroke of luck" that more than a dozen workers found schedules coinciding on that day.

When they arrived for their shifts, Johnson says, it took around an hour for the store's managers to realize what was going on.

"We were pulled into the office individually and spoken to and given option of going home and changing, or turning the shirts inside out. The majority us chose to go home."

For Johnson, the disconnect between the store's anti-racist messaging and its treatment of its employees remains a point of unresolved frustration. She claims that Whole Food workers continue experience discrimination, harassment and racial profiling on the job, but those issues are rarely confronted outside of brief training period offered during orientation for new hires.

"They're not diving deep into the problems," she says. "It's performative."

Reached for comment by email, a Whole Foods spokesperson declined to answer specific questions about the July 4 incident at the Milford store, but noted that the company had recently announced the creation of an employee-staffed Inclusion Task Force.

"In order to operate in a customer-focused environment, all Team Members must comply with our longstanding company dress code, which prohibits clothing with visible slogans, messages, logos or advertising that are not company-related," a company statement read. "If they choose not to accept the alternatives, they cannot work until they are in compliance with our company policy."