Elon Musk’s Valentine’s Day gift this year from Tesla workers in New York is a unionization effort. The effort is led by Autopilot analysts at the company’s Buffalo plant. The analysts make up about 800 employees who work in non-engineering roles and label data from the company’s Autopilot technology. Their wage starts at $19 per hour.
The workers told Bloomberg that they’d sent a letter to CEO Musk about their intent to unionize. They are seeking increased pay, a say in decision-making in the workplace, and a reduction in production pressures and monitoring. One member of the unionization committee, Al Celli, said, “People are tired of being treated like robots.” Six other employees told Bloomberg that Tesla’s monitoring of keystrokes to track productivity leads to some employees not taking bathroom breaks.
Today those behind the unionization effort will begin circulating leaflets to plant employees reading, “Roses are red / violets are blue / forming a union starts with you,” with links to the unionization website.
In the letter sent to Musk, the workers also asked the CEO to agree to restricting anti-union tactics. Tesla disbanded its PR department in 2020, and at the time of this writing Musk hasn’t tweeted about the unionization effort yet, so his thoughts on the unionization effort are unknown at this time. But the CEO’s past tweets may give us some indication about how he is likely to respond.
In June 2018, Musk tweeted that it was a “bigoted position” to think all unions were good and all companies were bad. In another tweet on the same day, Musk said, “I’m not against all unions” before going on to complain that the United Auto Workers union had “a track record of destroying productivity.” The tweets came after Tesla was accused of discouraging unionization efforts—an accusation that Tesla denied.
When asked by a Twitter user in May 2018 when Musk would allow his Tesla workers to form a union, Musk replied, “They can form a union whenever they want & there’s nothing I can do to stop them.”
In 2021, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Tesla repeatedly violated U.S. labor law by making efforts to undermine unionization efforts, Bloomberg reported.
More recently, in May 2022, Musk claimed in a series of tweets that “A union is just another corporation. Far better for many companies to compete for your skills, so that you have maximum optionality” and “The degree to which the unions control the Dems is insane. It’s like watching a sock puppet ‘talk’, but the hand inside the sock is way too obvious!”
If the Buffalo, New York, workers are successful in their unionization efforts, it will be the first time Tesla workers in the United States have formed a union. The Tesla workers are being assisted by Workers United, the group that helped Starbucks employees at a Buffalo store to become the first location to vote to unionize.
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