https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/nlrbs-gm-ruling-gives-employers-more-slack-to-discipline-speech?context=search&index=0

Ruling in a case involving General Motors LLC, the National Labor Relations Board has given private-sector employers more leeway to dole out discipline or fire workers for racist, sexist, and other profane speech or conduct in the context of workplace activism and union-related activity.

The Tuesday decision reinstates a 40-year-old test that had been supplanted by a series of setting-specific rulings that previously had applied to conduct or speech during encounters with management, on picket lines, and on social media.

...

For too long, “the Board has protected employees who engage in obscene, racist, and sexually harassing speech not tolerated in almost any workplace today,” NLRB Chairman John Ring said in a statement Tuesday. “Our decision in General Motors ends this unwarranted protection, eliminates the conflict between the NLRA and antidiscrimination laws, and acknowledges that the expectations for employee conduct in the workplace have changed.”

Workers have a federal right to join unions if they choose, and it’s generally illegal for businesses to interfere with or retaliate against union and organizing activity, like joining a strike or urging co-workers to unionize. Employers, on the other hand, have a right and legal obligation to prevent discrimination and harassment in their workplace.

To the naive, this may seem like a good thing, but:

Employers, lawyers, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have all pushed the NLRB to clarify this area of law and create more leeway for businesses to discipline, while some union advocates—including the preceding NLRB Chairman Mark Pearce, who is Black—have accused its current leadership of seizing on the inflammatory nature of racist speech to water down worker protections.

The ruling in the case involves a Black former GM employee named Charles Robinson who challenged his discipline. The company said it suspended Robinson three times for “separate incidents in which he engaged in profane or racially offensive conduct towards management or at bargaining meetings,” according to the Board’s opinion.

Robinson in one incident used an expletive while speaking to a manager about cross-training. And, on another occasion, “Robinson lowered his voice and mockingly acted a caricature of a slave,” pointing to a manager and asking whether the man preferred if he talked that way, according to the ruling.

First of all: based

Secondly, this is a lesson in how capital can use this sort of moralizing on issues of prejudice to weaken labour. The proper response is to not be convinced that the bosses have the workers' interests in mind.

If they're is any such prejudice amongst workers, it should be the institutions made up of workers, like unions, who carry about the appropriate discipline, the duty should not ceded to management who will only use it to undermine labour where ever possible.