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Tesla CEO Elon Musk has challenged United Auto Workers to try to organize employees at his company’s plant in Fremont, California, and has stepped up his attacks on Biden administration policies.
In a series of tweets this week, Musk followed the union, a topic he has been talking about since President Joe Biden, a supporter of organized labor, took office.
“Our real challenge is that Bay Area has negative unemployment, so if we don’t treat and compensate our (great) people well, they have a lot of other offers and will just leave!” Musk tweeted late Wednesday. “I would now like to invite the UAW to hold a union vote when it is convenient for them. Tesla will do nothing to stop them.
According to the website of the California Department of Employment Development, Fremont had an unemployment rate of 3.1% in December 2021, the latest available data.
Musk’s union criticism is nothing new. In 2018, he made comments that were found to have violated federal labor laws after Tesla fired a union activist.
The National Labor Council has ordered Tesla to hire the employee again and have Musk delete the tweet. But Tesla appealed the decision to the administrative court.
Musk’s latest tweets continued on Tuesday night, when Biden presented his address on the state of the Union. In a speech, Biden praised General Motors and Ford for their plans to invest in more electric vehicle production in the United States.
Musk responded by telling his more than 76 million followers that “Tesla has created more than 50,000 jobs in the United States in the electric vehicle industry and is investing more than double GM + Ford combined.”
GM said it expects annual capital expenditures of between $ 9 billion and $ 10 billion, largely in support of the transition to electric vehicles, while Ford plans to spend $ 5 billion on its electric vehicle efforts this year. Tesla said it plans to spend $ 5-7 billion this year to support its projects worldwide.
Musk has been particularly worried about Biden lately. He is attacking the administration’s Build Back Better proposal, which includes incentives for US consumers to buy electric vehicles, with bigger ones if they buy electric cars made by unions. And he caught Biden for his general reluctance to mention Tesla by name along with other American carmakers, even though he did so last month.
President Joe Biden addressed the state of the Union ahead of a joint session of Congress on March 1, 2022 in Washington.
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One of Musk’s tweets this week included a video on YouTube that he said “helps explain why former UAW members who work at Tesla are not big UAW fans.” The video was published in 2010 by the World Socialist Web Site on YouTube.
The video shows workers at the NUMMI plant, which would later become Tesla’s first electric vehicle factory, complaining that a union member was prevented from recording a UAW meeting at the local union hall.
Musk is not the only critic of the UAW. The Detroit-based union is under federal supervision through a court-approved monitor as part of an agreement between the UAW and the government following a long-running corruption investigation that sent 15 people to prison, including two recent UAW presidents and three Fiat Chrysler executives.
The investigation revealed years of bribes and concession schemes involving several senior union leaders.
Brian Rothenberg, a spokesman for the UAW, declined to comment on Musk’s tweets, but noted that Tesla had appealed the NLRB’s decision, asking the company to “respect fundamental organizational rights.”
UAW operates an organizational office near the Fremont plant with few people.
Rothenberg will not discuss any union efforts at Tesla or other electric car companies, citing the union’s policy of not commenting on activities until petitions are filed.
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.
The evolving EV market is a challenge for the UAW, which found in a 2018 study that Detroit’s automakers switching to electricity could cost the union tens of thousands of jobs. Rechargeable electric vehicles require far fewer parts than those manufactured with internal combustion engines, and many parts are manufactured outside the United States
Although unions are struggling to retain members, President Biden is urging Congress to pass legislation to protect workers’ rights. He proposed a Pro Act calling for the punishment of employers involved in illegal trade union opposition, wage theft and misclassification of workers.
“When the majority of workers want to form a union, they must not be stopped,” Biden said in a statement Tuesday.
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