While facing complaints about control over Twitter and deadly accidents spawned by the company’s Full Self-Driving technology, Tesla CEO Elon Musk is also facing some old-fashioned labor unrest.

As he has in the past, Musk has fired back by dismissing, potentially illegally, nearly three dozen employees at Gigafactory 2 near Buffalo, New York, who spoke out about working conditions.

Musk, who has repeatedly thumbed his nose at the federal agencies, like the National Labor Relations Board, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration investigating FSD’s failures as well as the Securities and Exchange Commission, fired the employees the day after the pro-union administration of President Joe Biden cut Tesla in on a larger piece of the nation’s spending on EV chargers.

The Tesla workers at a plant in Buffalo publicly announced a campaign to form what would be the electric car company’s first union, after a series of brutal snowstorms battered western New York earlier this winter. Workers in Tesla’s Autopilot division emailed a letter to management announcing their intent to unionize and asking the company to stay neutral in the campaign, according to various accounts.

According to Tesla’s website, “Autopilot introduces new features and improves existing functionality to make your Tesla safer and more capable over time.” In other words, they are part of team responsible for the company’s FSD and Autopilot technology.

The Autopilot group has roughly 800 workers and about 1,600 nearby, who make among other products, high-capacity electric-vehicle chargers, according to an organizer with the campaign. 

“This is really only a fight to make a good job better,” Keenan Lasch, one of the campaign’s organizers, said in a statement announcing the union drive. “We are paid far less than the national average for our job title and have next to no sick time. We are only asking for a seat in the car that we helped build,” he said.

Other organizers said workers in Tesla’s Buffalo facility face heavy monitoring and sometimes skip bathroom breaks because they feel pressured to keep their metrics up.

Looking to sign a card

In another statement, Will Hance, who started working at Tesla in October, said he was one of a group of new hires who were promised raises to $20.40 an hour after three months of work — raises that never materialized. Many workers were also disillusioned when Tesla delayed a decision to close its facility during the historic snowstorm that hit Buffalo in December, he said.

In an online company forum, “people were complaining about the policy, and people had begun to react to some of the posts with union emojis, and that’s where I first heard about it,” he said.

The Tesla workers in Buffalo want to join Workers United, an offshoot of the Service Employees International Union. Workers United has a younger orientation than old line industrial unions, such as the United Auto Workers. 

In recent months, Workers United has moved to organize hundreds of Starbucks stores, and also confronted employers such as Apple and Amazon.  

Complaints about monitoring and meddling have been something of a common theme among Tesla employees not only in Buffalo but also at the company’s key plant in Fremont, California and at Musk’s SpaceX site in Florida where employees have reportedly asked the Tesla CEO to stay away.

In Florida, Tesla is accused of violating national labor laws by allegedly telling employees at its Orlando, location not to talk about pay and working conditions. In a complaint filed in September, the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) regional director in Tampa claims Tesla “told employees not to complain to higher level managers about their pay or other conditions of employment” and warned them “not to discuss their pay with other persons.”

In December, the National Relations Labor Board’s chief prosecutor charged Tesla illegally silenced workers in Florida by telling them not to discuss pay or another worker’s firing, which would be against federal labor law.

Hundreds of young, highly skilled Twitter employees also quit last fall rather than work for Musk.

Musk dismisses unions

Musk has no love for unions and has succeeded in thwarting the United Auto Workers efforts to recruit members at big Fremont plant in the pro-union Bay Area.  

“A union is just another corporation” the billionaire CEO tweeted last year, claiming at the time that if workers at the California plant unionized, they would lose stock options. 

The NLRB has ruled Tesla illegally coerced some Fremont workers, although the company is appealing that ruling to the conservative Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals New Orleans, which is considered unlikely to rule against Musk in a case that has dragged on for six years.

To date, the former employee fired for organizing for the UAW, Richard Ortiz, has not been rehired, and Musk hasn’t deleted the offending tweet as ordered by the NLRB.

It also is illegal for employers to interfere with attempts by workers to unionize, including prohibiting “union buttons, t-shirts, and other union insignia unless special circumstances warrant” and to “convey the message that selecting a union would be futile,” or wearing pro-union badges as Tesla has done in Fremont, according to the NLRB.

However, the firings thwarted the UAW’s organizing drive in Fremont. The organizing drive also was badly undermined by the corruption scandal among UAW leaders, which Musk used to his advantage in various tweets. However, an underground pro-union sentiment still exists in the sprawling factory despite Musk’s attempts to stamp it out.

Biden touts non-union chargers made in Buffalo

The pro-labor Biden administration’s actions on EVs have spurred network operators to accelerate the build out of coast-to-coast EV charging networks, the administration noted this month.

Public dollars will supplement private investment by filling gaps, serving rural and hard to reach locations, and building capacity in communities. Announcements being spotlighted today will add more than 100,000 public chargers available for all EVs, and include, the administration said.

Among those benefitting from the new charger investments is Tesla.

Tesla, for the first time, will open a portion of its U.S. Supercharger and Destination Charger network to non-Tesla EVs, making at least 7,500 chargers available for all EVs by the end of 2024 across the United States. 

The Tesla-built network touted by the White House will include at least 3,500 new and existing 250 kW Superchargers along highway corridors to expand freedom of travel for all EVs, and Level 2 Destination Charging at locations like hotels and restaurants in urban and rural locations.  

All EV drivers will be able to access these stations using the Tesla app or website. Additionally, Tesla will more than double its network of Superchargers, manufactured in Buffalo, according to the White House.

Tesla began production of solar cells and modules at Gigafactory 2 — a 1.2 million square-foot facility in Buffalo, New York in 2017. In 2019, Tesla added new production lines that will support electrical components for Supercharger and energy storage products.

Originally a steel manufacturing site, the 88-acre property located along the Buffalo River was transformed to produce solar panels and solar cells.

• SEO Powered Content & PR Distribution. Get Amplified Today.
• Platoblockchain. Web3 Metaverse Intelligence. Knowledge Amplified. Access Here.
• Source: https://www.thedetroitbureau.com/2023/02/tesla-facing-labor-unrest-at-new-york-plant/