What a switch. We’ve heard of employees being canceled by employers for not being “woke.” But in what may be a first, “rock star” Northeast butcher Fleishers has been forced to close all four of its locations after three dozen workers walked out — because the CEO removed their Black Lives Matter and sexual devolutionary (“LGBT”) signs from store windows.
Apparently, these employees believe that store owners should sacrifice business and money for their principles.
Of course, the closure won’t be permanent; the chain is expected to reopen in or after late August. But its woes are yet another lesson in the cost of political correctness, in Fleishers’ case in hiring practices: It’s reported that at least 50 percent of the business’s approximately 40 staffers “identify as BIPOC, nonbinary, or queer.” Well, yay for diversity.
Forbes was the first to report on the story, writing:
The first sign of trouble for Fleisher’s came on July 22. That’s the day Rob Rosania, a leading investor in the Brooklyn-based craft butcher, received a text from a friend in Westport, Connecticut, who was offended by symbols supporting the Black Lives Matter movement in the company’s local shop window.
Rosania, a real estate developer known for gentrifying urban areas across the country, called Fleisher’s CEO, John Adams, and ordered them removed. Adams, the company’s fourth leader in as many years and just two months into the job, took the train from New York to the company’s outlet in Westport to remove the signs, in addition to ones displaying support of LGBTQ pride, and then returned to do the same at one of its two New York City locations.
The employees were having none of it, especially because Adams, who had just moved to New York from the Bay Area, had come in with the promise of bringing accountability to the company of about 40 workers.
Of course, we have many strange definitions and assumptions today, including that a man can be a woman, 2+2 can equal 5, and discrimination is “equity.” But it sounds as if the signs’ removal was an example of bringing accountability to the chain. Employees are at a business to earn money in exchange for bringing value to it, not to use it as a vehicle through which to further their activism.
But try telling that to Ajani Thompson, 32, “the only Black employee at the butcher’s store in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood,” relates the New York Post. Referring to what he related to Adams about “accountability,” Thompson said, “I told him he failed at that,” the paper further reports. “You were trying to get our trust, and I don’t feel comfortable here. I don’t feel safe coming into work because you didn’t do that.”
Claiming to not “feel safe” is, as with the “Offensiveness Ploy” before it, a popular leftist strategy. A wokester says he doesn’t feel safe — as if his feelings constitute a deific arbiter of reality — and you’re supposed to fall all over yourself reordering your domain to conform to his emotions (which themselves always, it just so happens, conform to a hard-left agenda).
Thompson said “that workers hoped Adams would serve as a buffer between them and Rosania, who has gotten more involved since he first invested in 2015,” the Post also reported. “‘Think of me as an equal and none of this needed to happen,’ Thompson told the outlet [Forbes],” the paper later related. “‘It’s messed up to think of someone as less-than and then want them to provide for you.’”
Of course, treating him as an “equal” would mean removing the signs, as employees aren’t as a rule allowed to visibly politicize their workplaces as they see fit.
In reality, the mistake was allowing the signs in the first place. As I wrote just yesterday in relation to Subway’s featuring soccer “kneeler” Megan Rapinoe in ads, “What’s for sure is that once you ‘go Rapinoe,’ there’s no graceful way out. To never wade into politics is okay, but upon hiring an ideologue or staking out a position a dilemma presents itself. For perpetuating the campaign will continue alienating those in opposition; ending it will alienate those in support. You’ve left Eden, and there’s no going back.”
Allowing the signs created a woke norm, and people always react negatively when suddenly denied a cherished status quo they’ve come to take for granted.
Fleishers may very well reopen with different staff, although CEO Adams can’t be confused with Braveheart’s William Wallace. For upon witnessing the employee revolt, he “returned the signs within 24 hours,” MSN writes (to no avail, obviously).
But here’s a suggestion for management. Tell the employees the following:
You’ll conduct a study to determine how much monthly revenue the overt activism is losing the business. You’ll then be happy to replace the signs if the disgruntled employees contribute that amount to an “activism fund.” If it’s $100 a month per wokester, these devoted, passionate, principled fonts of virtue should consider it a small price to pay to advance their noble calling.
Something tells me, however, that the moment their principles impacted their pocketbook, they’d be on the chopping block. If so, it’ll be yet another example of how leftists outsource not just their charity, but their sacrifice, too.
