On February 15th, a Tesla factory in Buffalo, New York sent out an e-mail informing employees that they could no longer record workplace meetings without all participants’ permission. It also just so happens this plant was in the process of trying to form a union with Tesla Workers United.
The next day, Tesla Workers United pointed out this policy violate federal labor law. Also, New York has a one-party consent law to record conversations. Making recording work meetings, without everyone agreeing to it, perfectly legal. And after that, several employees just so happen to be fired.
“We’re angry. This won’t slow us down. This won’t stop us,” current Tesla employee and organizing committee member Sara Costantino said. “They want us to be scared, but I think they just started a stampede. We can do this. But I believe we will do this.”
Tesla released a statement saying that the terminations were unrelated to the efforts to unionize. The company contends that the list of employees being fired was finalized on February 3rd. But that they only became aware of organizing activities on February 13th. Meaning they found out a day before Tesla Workers United organizing committee sent a letter to management. The letter told them workers wanted to “build an even more collaborative environment that will strengthen the company.”
The company attest the dismissals were due to poor ratings on performance reviews. Reviews that were conducted before the union campaign was discovered. “We learned in hindsight that one out of the 27 impacted employees officially identified as part of the union campaign,” Tesla said. “This exercise pre-dated any union campaign.” Tesla Workers United claims that the demands on Tesla workers are “unfair, unattainable, ambiguous and ever changing.”
“I feel blindsided, I got COVID and was out of the office, then I had to take a bereavement leave,” Arian Berek, organizing committee member and one of the fired employees, said. “I returned to work, was told I was exceeding expectations and then Wednesday came along. I strongly feel this is in retaliation to the committee announcement, and it’s shameful.”
All of this caused the Rochester Regional Joint Board of Workers United to file a complaint against Tesla with the National Labor Relations Board. In this complaint, they list several terminated employees who were part of the factory’s autopilot department. The group believes that Tesla “terminated these individuals in retaliation for union activity and to discourage union activity.”
“The president supports fundamental rights for workers under the National Labor Relations Act, including the right to organize free from intimidation or coercion,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said. While they were not called out by name, both Tesla and Starbucks have recently pulled questionable tactics. Most of which seems like very thinly veiled attempts at union busting.
CEO Elon Musk has also been pretty vocal about how much he doesn’t like organized labor. In 2021,Tesla was even ordered by the National Labor Relations Board to take down a tweet from 2018. In it, Musk said he threatened employees with loss of stock options if they chose to be represented by the United Auto Workers. Which is illegal. While the factory in Buffalo makes solar panels, not cars, it’s not really a stretch to think this was by design.
