According to a complaint filed with a government body, Tesla lay off dozens of employees from its Autopilot department at its Buffalo plant on Wednesday, a day after workers initiated a drive to organize a union.
This week, Tesla employees in New York announced that they will unionize with Workers United Upstate New York, giving them a voice at work.
In a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board on Wednesday, the Workers United Upstate New York union accused the world’s most valuable automaker of retaliating by firing some employees “in retaliation for union activity.”
The corporation terminated more than thirty employees, the union claimed in a statement, adding that the workers received an email with a revised policy prohibiting them from recording workplace meetings without the consent of all participants.
This policy breaches federal labor law and New York’s one-party consent recording legislation.
The workers had requested that the electric vehicle manufacturer respect their freedom to join a union and urged the firm to sign the Fair Election Principles, which would bar Tesla from intimidating or retaliating against the employees.
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, has in the past been open about his antipathy to unions. In 2018, he tweeted that employees who formed a union would forfeit their stock options, prompting the NLRB to ask him to delete the remark.
»Buffalo Tesla workers claim union campaign led to firing«