Elon Musk and a powerful US union could clash next year in what could be a defining moment for both the embattled tech titan and an American labour movement eager to flex its muscles, fresh from a dramatic victory over Detroit’s carmakers.
The battle is shaping up as 2023 draws to a close – a big year for US unions, and a complicated one for Musk.
The world’s richest man has started so many dumpster fires on X (aka Twitter), it’s hard to see his many achievements through the smoke. Meanwhile, the biggest US unions have scored a series of victories that have burnished their reputations in ways Musk can only envy.
As the only US carmaker whose workers are not represented by a union, Musk’s Tesla, the world’s most valuable car company, has long been a target of the United Auto Workers (UAW).
After years of scandal and setbacks, the union has a new leader who won a major – and popular – victory after taking industrial action against the Big Three car companies: Ford, General Motors and Stellantis.
The UAW is looking to continue this momentum by taking on non-unionised car companies, with Tesla a key target given its dominant market role in the transition to electric vehicles.
“Elon Musk is the richest man in the world, with a net worth of $230 billion,” says the UAW’s new organising website. “US production has more than doubled since 2020, and Tesla’s sales are booming. The question is, will Tesla workers get their fair share? It’s time for Tesla workers to stand up and fight for more.”
It looks like it will be a tough and high-profile fight. Inside Tesla, pro-union workers are hopeful but realistic. They fear that Musk’s past ruthlessness towards workers trying to unionise, and the slow, ineffective processes for enforcing US labour laws, could hamper the effort.
“There’s so much disinformation,” said a pro-union Tesla worker at the company’s Fremont, California, factory, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. A previous attempt to unionise ended with “Elon firing everyone and it’s going to be years of litigation”, they said.
“He doesn’t care, he got them out of there. It’s going to be a long time before they get their jobs back. It’s disgusting what they’re doing, but that’s Elon, he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about any of the workers here.
The UAW has tried to unionise Tesla facilities before, most notably in 2016 in Fremont, at Tesla’s “factory of the future”, a place where beleaguered workers had reported problems including fainting, seizures, abnormal breathing and chest pains.
As the organising drive got underway, Musk seized on these complaints, promising that “every injury will be reported directly to me, no exceptions” and vowing to make safety a top priority. The union drive failed.
Since then, Musk has changed, seemingly becoming more combative and mercurial. Tesla, too, has changed – it became the world’s most valuable carmaker in 2020 and began to turn a profit after years of losses.
The UAW has also changed. After a corruption scandal involving the union’s leaders led to numerous criminal charges in 2020, Shawn Fain won election as president in March 2023 on a reform ticket and has emerged as a powerful force in US labour, courted by both Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
In his first major test as union leader, he helped the UAW win historic gains in its contracts with the Big Three and won the endorsement of both presumptive presidential nominees at a time when polls show support for US unions at levels not seen since the 1960s.
“The union leadership’s approach to organising has changed, and the change is overdue. The emphasis is on public communication and mobilising workers at multiple workplaces. They used to focus on one non-union plant at a time; now they say they’re focusing on all of them,” said Ian Greer, director of the Ithaca Industrial and Labor Relations (IRL) Co-Lab and research professor at Cornell University.
He explained that the non-union assembly industry has been an issue for the UAW since the 1980s, but stressed that the UAW under new leadership has changed its approach in how it talks about non-union workers as “future union brothers and sisters”.
“The Detroit Three agreements will make unionisation more attractive to the unorganised in terms of potential economic gains than it was before,” he added. “I don’t see Tesla as very different from the other non-union carmakers in this respect, but Elon Musk’s combative public statements may be useful to organisers given the newfound sophistication of union communications.”
The UAW’s previous efforts to unionise Tesla came to an end after allegations of retaliation and union busting, which may indicate a battle plan for how Tesla is likely to fight the UAW’s latest effort.
Among the workers who lost their jobs last time was union organiser Richard Ortiz, a worker at Tesla’s Fremont plant. A federal appeals court in March upheld a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruling that Ortiz was illegally fired by Tesla in retaliation for union organising, and ordered his reinstatement. Tesla is appealing this decision. The court also upheld a ruling that Musk violated labour law by tweeting that Tesla workers would lose stock options if they unionised, and ordered Musk to delete the tweet.
Jose Moran, another worker at the Fremont factory, wrote a public blog post in 2017 detailing the grievances faced by workers at the factory. Musk falsely accused Moran of being a paid union agitator. Moran claimed that Musk had offered to address workers’ safety complaints if they refrained from unionising.
In 2018, Dezzimond Vaughn, a worker at the Fremont factory, and his supervisor told the Guardian that Tesla changed his performance reviews to justify firing him for union activity. Tesla denied that the firing was retaliatory and claimed that filing unfair labour practice charges was an organising tactic.
Crystal Guardado also claimed in a 2018 interview with the Guardian that she was fired by Tesla for her involvement in the union drive under the guise of testing positive for marijuana, though she said she provided HR with her medical marijuana documentation.
“I think Tesla definitely needs a union,” Guardado told the Guardian in response to the renewed organising drive, citing that she still hears the same issues from workers at the plant, including unequal pay, favouritism and rampant retaliation.
Tesla has also faced allegations of firing workers in retaliation for union organising in Buffalo, New York, as part of a United Steelworkers union drive in 2019, and more recently in March 2023, a day after Workers United publicly announced a union drive at Buffalo’s Gigafactory 2. The union is currently appealing a ruling that dismissed that claim, but found merit in two separate claims against Tesla’s response to the union drive.
In April 2023, an administrative law judge ruled that Tesla violated labour laws by suppressing workers at a service centre in Orlando, Florida, from discussing wages and raising grievances about working conditions.
There are currently 17 open unfair labour practice charges pending with the NLRB involving Tesla, which has denied all previous allegations of retaliation.
Musk is already battling much stronger labour forces in Sweden and has taken to X to attack them, calling their actions ‘insane’. The coming dispute will no doubt be fought on X (although the UAW’s Fain seems to prefer Facebook), but Musk’s overarching attitude to unions is clear. Like union bashers before him, Musk characterises unions as adversaries rather than a collective voice for workers.
“I disagree with the idea of unions … [because] I just don’t like anything that creates a lords and peasants kind of thing,” Musk told the New York Time’s Dealbook conference last month. “If Tesla gets unionised, it will be because we deserve it and because we failed in some way.”
Like Amazon and Starbucks, Tesla is likely to use the US’s broken labour protections to try to stop the UAW, said Cathy Creighton, director of Cornell’s Buffalo IRL co-lab and a former NLRB field attorney.
“Because of our very weak labour laws in the US, it’s very difficult for workers to form a union in their workplace, as Elon Musk’s anti-union tactics have shown,” said Creighton, who added that Musk faces a tougher fight this time.
“The main reason we see young people unionising is that they want to have a voice in their workplace. They don’t want to just be subjected to whatever happens to them without any say in it,” she said. “If there’s a power imbalance between a big employer and a particular individual voice of a worker, there’s no way that worker can make any real gains without a collective voice.
“I think people understand that, and that’s why we have these very high levels of public support for unions, amazingly high levels of public support for the car workers’ strike. So if I were Elon Musk and I wanted the status quo, I’d be nervous that the status quo might change in the future.”
