Tesla CEO Elon Musk sent a bad tweet on May 21, 2018, and this is normal because all tweets are bad. But now Musk’s tweet was also considered illegal.
The backstory involves a union effort at the Tesla plant in Fremont, California, which Musk ridiculed at the time, claiming that Tesla workers were well paid. “They are the highest paid in the industry if you include equity, that obviously you must include“, He said in an organized conference call to discuss Tesla’s fourth quarter results for 2017.
Tesla has to make Musk delete a tweet. This is the tweet in question:
The National Council for Labor Relations determined that the part about union contributions and stock options was illegal coercion, because threatening to take part of someone else’s remuneration – in this case, stock options – if employees form a union is illegal. Written notices must also be posted informing Tesla employees of their organizational rights.
The NLRB also determined that, due to violations of labor law, Tesla must re-hire an employee named Richard Ortiz and return the payment. Ortiz had been fired in October 2017.
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The UAW, which was behind the organizational effort, issued the following statement:
“This is a huge victory for workers who have the courage to stand up and organize in a system that is currently heavily stacked in favor of employers like Tesla, who have no qualms about breaking the law,” said the vice president. of the UAW, Cindy Estrada, director of the UAW Organizing Department. “While we celebrate justice in today’s decision, it highlights the substantial shortcomings in the United States’ labor legislation. Here is a company that clearly broke the law, but these workers still have three years to achieve a minimum of justice ”.
Two Republicans and a five-person NLRB Democrat voted in favor of the decision, which barely got Musk to read the rights of his own employees. Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.
From Bloomberg, as published by Automotive News:
NLRB President Lauren McFerran, currently the only Democratic member of the council, supported reading the warning aloud, but was defeated on that point by her Republican colleagues. McFerran’s reasoning was that Tesla committed “numerous” violations of the law, according to the decision, several of which were perpetrated by senior company officials.
Publishing a written notice sends a much weaker signal to employees than making executives read aloud, said Harvard Law School professor Benjamin Sachs, who suggested that force Musk to post the notice on his Twitter account it would also have been a more appropriate solution.
When executives need to read the notice to employees, he said, it shows workers “that the boss is not the only authority in the world – that the law is an authority higher than the boss”.
Unionize your workplace if you can. And never tweet.
You can read the full NLRB decision below.