Elon Musk has another issue to deal with besides his Twitter engagement problem – Tesla workers in New York have announced they want to form a union to arbitrate for better workplace conditions.
The workers wrote a letter to management an stated their intent. This isn’t the first time workers have tried to unionize at a Tesla factory, but past efforts have been successfully squashed. Musk, for his part, has stated his opposition to unions in the past, tweeting in 2018 that there’s “Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union. Could do so tmrw if they wanted. But why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing?”
The National Labor Relations Board told Tesla that Musk needed to delete the tweet. It’s still there. CNBC shared the an excerpt of the letter from the workers.
“We want Tesla to be the company we know it can be. Our union will further Tesla’s principles and objectives, including by helping to serve as the conscience of the organization and by ensuring and deepening our culture of trust and respect.”
The workers want a few things: better wages, more job security, more autonomy in making decisions, and less monitoring and pressure about production. Bloomberg reported that workers in Buffalo claimed Tesla monitors keystrokes on their computers, and that workers forego bathroom breaks because of it.
The workers have teamed up with the Workers United labor union, an organization that’s helped numerous other companies unionize. Unionizing, the workers said, would “further accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy, because it will give us a voice in our workplace and in the goals we set for ourselves to accomplish.”
The workers also asked Tesla to sign the Fair Election Principles, a move meant to minimize prosecution from Tesla. They’re also handing out Valentine’s Day-themed pamphlets with a website to sign union cards. Here’s what some of the workers are saying, via Bloomberg.
“I want a voice with my company — we don’t really have one,” one person said. “People are tired of being treated like robots,” a member of the union’s organizing committee said.
In 2017, The National Labor Relations Board said Tesla was making it difficult to unionize by intimidating workers. The NLRB filed a complaint that said security guards at the company asked workers who were trying to unionize to show IDs and then leave the factory.
Tesla also instituted a policy that prohibited workers from talking about work with the news media or share about it on social media. They were also prohibited from forwarding emails from work to personal accounts. Tesla, at the time, called the complaint “baseless.”
We’ll keep you posted on this one.