Tesla CEO Elon Musk sent a bad tweet on May 21, 2018, and that’s normal because all tweets are bad. But now Musk’s tweet has also been deemed illegal.
The background story involves a unionization effort at the Tesla plant in Fremont, California, which Musk teased at that moment, claiming that Tesla workers were well compensated. “They are the highest paid in the industry if net worth is included, which you should obviously include“, He said in a conference call to discuss Tesla’s fourth-quarter results for 2017.
Tesla has to get Musk to delete a tweet. This is the tweet in question:
The National Labor Relations Board ruled that the part on union dues and stock options was an illegal coercion, because threatening to take out part of someone’s compensation (in this case, stock options) if the employees form a union is illegal. Written notices must also be issued informing Tesla employees of their organizational rights.
The NLRB also ruled that due to violations of labor law, Tesla should be re-hired an employee named Richard Ortiz and returns his salary. Ortiz had been fired in October 2017.
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The UAW, which was behind the organizing effort, issued the following statement:
“This is a great victory for workers who have the courage to stand up and organize in a system that is currently strongly held together in favor of employers like Tesla who have no violation of the law,” he said. say UAW Vice President Cindy Estrada, director of the UAW Organizing Department. “While we celebrate justice in today’s ruling, it nevertheless highlights the substantial flaws in U.S. labor law. Here is a company that clearly violated the law and yet three years have passed. before these workers achieve a minimum of justice ”.
Two Republicans and a five-person NLRB Democrat voted in favor of the decision, which stopped Musk from reading his rights to his own employees. Tesla has not responded to any comments.
From Bloomberg, published by Automotive News:
NLRB president Lauren McFerran, currently the only Democratic member of the board, supported the notice being read aloud, but her Republican colleagues voted on the point. McFerran’s reasoning was that Tesla committed “numerous” violations of the law, according to the ruling, several of them perpetrated by senior company officials.
Posting a written notice sends a much weaker signal to employees than making executives read it aloud, said Harvard Law School professor Benjamin Sachs, who suggested forcing Musk to post the notice in the your Twitter account would also have been a more appropriate remedy.
When executives have 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 a higher authority than the boss.”
Unionize your workplace if you can. And never tweet.
You can read the full NLRB decision below.