Elon Musk says Tesla will do nothing to cease United Auto Workers (UAW) from holding a union vote on the firm’s Fremont, California manufacturing facility. In a tweet, the corporate chief mentioned Tesla’s actual problem within the Bay Area is adverse unemployment, so it treats and compensates its “(awesome) people well” or they’d simply depart in any other case.
Musk posted the tweet in response to Kiss co-lead singer Gene Simmons who sided with the manager when he known as out the President for not mentioning Tesla in his State of the Union Address. The President solely praised Ford and General Motors for investing billions of {dollars} of their efforts to launch electrical automobiles, thereby producing hundreds of jobs within the course of. As Bloomberg notes, Biden is a labor union supporter and infrequently snubs Tesla, which has a non-unionized workforce, in his speeches and interviews.
Our actual problem is Bay Area has adverse unemployment, so if we don’t deal with and compensate our (superior) individuals nicely, they’ve many different gives and can simply depart!
I’d like hereby to ask UAW to carry a union vote at their comfort. Tesla will do nothing to cease them.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 3, 2022
In a follow-up tweet, Musk claimed that Tesla manufacturing facility staff have the best compensation within the auto trade, posting an interview of GM CEO Mary Barra as his supply. In the interview, information anchor and journalist Andrew Sorkin mentioned Tesla’s non-unionized staff had been incomes greater than their unionized counterparts. Barra mentioned she’d must see extra data, since one should additionally take advantages and never simply wages into consideration, however that what Sorkin mentioned wasn’t the case final time she checked.
The UAW has been working to unionize Tesla for years, and Musk has criticized these efforts from the beginning. When a Fremont manufacturing employee claimed poor working situations and low pay in 2017, Musk reportedly despatched out a letter to workers with a point-by-point takedown whereas additionally slamming UAW. He mentioned the union’s true allegiance is to the “giant car companies, where the money they take from employees in dues is vastly more than they could ever make from Tesla.”
In the identical yr, the National Labor Relations Board filed a criticism in opposition to the automaker after investigating complaints of unfair labor practices. According to the NLRB, staff mentioned Tesla “coerces and intimidates” them with a confidentiality settlement that forestalls them from discussing unionization. In 2018, the NLRB discovered that the corporate violated labor legal guidelines when it fired union activist Richard Ortiz and ordered it to compensate him for lack of earnings and advantages.
The labor board additionally ordered Musk to delete a tweet which may sound like a menace to workers. In the tweet, Musk equally invited efforts to unionize. “Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union. Could do so [tomorrow] if they wanted,” he wrote. However, he additionally mentioned: “But why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing?” NLRB chair Wilma Liebman defined on the time that to an worker, that will sound like they will not have inventory choices in the event that they vote to unionize. As Electrek notes, Tesla gives its inventory compensation program to most of its workers, and the corporate’s rising inventory costs makes it a really invaluable profit.
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