Union says Tesla fired Buffalo workers seeking to organize
Tesla fired at least 18 employees, including several leaders of a unionization campaign, a day after they announced plans to organize a Tesla plant in Buffalo, New York, workers said in a filing to the National Labor Relations Board.
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, has been blunt in his opposition to unions, and the company has a reputation for using hardball tactics against union organizers.
“I strongly feel this is in retaliation to the committee announcement, and it’s shameful,” Arian Berek, a member of the Buffalo organizing committee, said in a statement. Berek said she was fired after returning to work after a bout with COVID-19 and bereavement leave.
The Rochester branch of the Workers United union, in a “charge against employer” dated Wednesday, told the labor relations board that it sought an injunction to block the firings, which it called unlawful. Tesla “terminated these individuals in retaliation for union activity and to discourage union activity,” the filing said. The firings were reported earlier by Bloomberg News.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Jaz Brisack, an organizer with Workers United who has been involved in the campaign, said in an interview Tuesday that workers had decided to go public with their organizing effort partly to make it easier for them to communicate with one another about those efforts.
She said many workers had complained of being closely monitored at their computers and going public would give them more freedom to have conversations about the union campaign. It is illegal for a company to fire workers for so-called protected concerted activity such as seeking to unionize.
The Buffalo factory makes solar panels and components for charging equipment, according to Tesla’s website, and has about 800 workers who help develop driverassistance software.
The labor dispute appears likely to complicate Tesla’s relationship with President Joe Biden, who on Wednesday praised the company’s decision to open up a portion of its charging network to owners of other electric vehicles.
The move seemed to represent an improvement in the relationship between Biden and Musk, who had complained that the administration paid insufficient attention to Tesla during its push for electric vehicle subsidies.
But Biden has also cast himself as a strong promoter of unions, and the president has been critical of companies that take what he considers to be antiunion actions. A White House spokesperson said in a statement Thursday that “the president supports fundamental rights for workers under the National Labor Relations Act, including the right to organize free from intimidation and coercion.”
Companies run by Musk have responded to worker organizing in the past by firing the employees involved.
In 2021, the National Labor Relations Board found that Tesla had illegally fired a worker involved in organizing at the company’s car factory in Fremont, California, and that Musk had illegally threatened workers with the loss of stock options if they unionized.
The board ordered Tesla to reinstate the worker with back pay and ordered Musk to delete a Twitter post making the implied threat. The post appears to still be active.
Last year, SpaceX, the rocket manufacturer Musk started, fired at least eight employees after they helped to write a letter to management urging the company to distance itself from Musk’s sometimes inflammatory statements on Twitter and to better enforce the company’s policies on sexual harassment and discrimination.
In that case, the employees deliberately avoided broaching the subject of unionization because, in addition to Musk’s reputation as anti-union, the company required managers to receive training on how to prevent union activity. The workers said they hoped that avoiding the subject would allow them to work constructively with executives to address their concerns. But the company nonetheless fired several of them shortly after the letter became public.
The employees filed unfair labor practice charges with the labor board in November; the cases are pending.