While Elon Musk works in Snailbrook, the city-company for the workers of Tesla, SpaceX and The Boring Company, it seems that the South African billionaire is (again) in trouble with the law. According to an American court, in fact, Musk would have violated a federal labor law in 2018.
The matter concerns the workers of Tesla, and it is quite tangled. In 2018, on Twitter, Musk had explained what the its position on the formation of trade unions inside companies like Tesla and SpaceX. In the case of Tesla, in particular, the billionaire had explained that “there is nothing stopping Tesla employees on our lines from voting to form a union. They could do it tomorrow if they wanted to”.
In short, from these words it seems that Elon Musk was all in all open to the formation of a workers’ union by Tesla. However, in a second tweetsthe CEO of the car company had added: “Why [i lavoratori] should they pay the economic costs of a union and dispense with stock options for nothing? Our safety data is twice as good as it used to be, and everyone already has access to health insurance.”.
This second part of Elon Musk’s post immediately caught the attention of the United Auto Workers Union (UAW), according to which the billionaire implicitly economically threatened its employees with words written on Twitter. The reason is simple: Musk would have linked union membership and the forced renunciation of options on Tesla shares, which however would not be automatic at all and, indeed, does not seem to be incompatible with the creation of worker networks.
According to Tesla, the tweets had a very different meaning, and it was certainly not a veiled threat: with his words, in fact, Elon Musk simply meant that the workers of other companies receive no shares and options of stock of the companies they work for, but only their salary. In other words, the tweets by Elon Musk just wanted to highlight that Tesla employees received better treatment than other companies in theautomotivealso thanks to the extra money linked to the shares assigned to employees.
According to the major American trade union associations, however, Musk’s was a real threat, and as such he was legally prosecuted. Now, bring it back Business Insiderthe legal proceedings were concluded and the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals would found Elon Musk guilty that he had broken US labor law, with what, according to the judges, was an illegal threat to employees about to form a union.
