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by darawk 1386 days ago
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.

2 comments

Was the dress code instituted before or after people started wearing pro-union insignia?
“Tesla's strict enforcement of the policy began in 2017, shortly after employees started wearing union shirts in a Fremont, California, factory.”
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.
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.