Attempted union formation: Tesla fires dozens of employees

Tesla boss Musk has never made a secret of his aversion to unions. Nevertheless, workers at a plant in the USA wanted to form a union – a day later they held their resignation in their hands.

On Tuesday, a committee wrote an email to Tesla CEO Elon Musk and announced that it wanted to set up an employee representative body at a Tesla plant in Buffalo. Just one day later, the layoffs were flooding in.

The union “Workers Union Tesla” speaks of an illegal retaliatory measure intended to intimidate the employees. According to you, more than 30 employees are affected. She now wants to obtain an injunction against the layoffs.

Union should improve working conditions

At the affected plant in New York State, 800 employees are working on the further development of the autopilot in Tesla vehicles. By organizing in a union, they wanted to achieve better working conditions in addition to higher wages and more say.

According to employees, Tesla has recently increased production pressure at the plant and even monitors the keystrokes on the computers. As a result, some employees no longer dared to take a toilet break.

Tesla boss Musk has never made a secret of his aversion to unions in the past. In 2018, he threatened employees would lose their stock options if they unionized. To date, there has been no employee representation at Tesla anywhere in the United States.

With “Union Busters” against the establishment of trade unions

In the USA, a majority of the employees of a company or a plant must vote in favor of the establishment of an employee representative body. If this succeeds, all employees are automatically members of the relevant trade union and have to pay membership fees.

Large companies, in particular, often succeed in preventing the formation of unions by having specialized consulting firms stir up anti-union sentiment in the company. Recently, however, attempts at organizing employees at the local level have been successful. In the meantime, individual branches of the coffee chain Starbucks can be represented by unions.