Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

"... ideologically motivated attack by an extremist organization working directly with union supporters to create a calculated disinformation campaign against Tesla. The piece even includes an interview with Worksafe – the same organization that the UAW enlisted to publish a negative report against Tesla last year, and whose board includes labor union officials and advocates."[1] - from Tesla's own site.

Wow. That sounds like something Hannity or Trump would say. Is Musk losing it?

The United Automotive Workers union is hardly an "extremist organization".

[1] https://www.tesla.com/blog/not-so-revealing-story

View on HN

Reveal won a Pulitzer Prize in this year for revealing how all around the country judges steered convicted drug offenders into rehab / thinly disguised private industry work camps. I guess that is pretty extremist if one is in favor of private industry work camps and judges benefiting from them. Nomination details: http://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/amy-julia-harris-and-shosh...

> Reveal won a Pulitzer Prize in this year....

Turns out they were a finalist not the winners. The difference is here: http://www.pulitzer.org/page/frequently-asked-questions (no. 23). 3 finalists are chosen by that category jury from the submissions and one winner is picked by the board from that.

Good info though. Thanks.

Clarification: they were finalists for the award in national reporting. The WaPo and NYT were the winners this year: http://www.pulitzer.org/winners/staffs-new-york-times-and-wa...

Reveal was also a finalist in 2013 (back when it was named California Watch) for the award in public service (generally considered the most prestigious of the Pulitzers): http://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/california-watch

The author line of the blog post reads 'The Tesla Team'.

However, I'm not surprised there is no single person putting her name on this blog post.

Having said that, I can imagine that unions are disliked here on HN / in the US due to various reasons. In the end, from what I witness, they care significantly for human rights across companies. If they weren't there, companies would squeeze out life of the low-end workers at a significantly higher rate, than they already do.

It's a funny thing: Move fast and break things. This basically stops working, when 'things' are humans.

The blog post didn't call UAW extermist, that remark was clearly directed at Reveal the organization behind the article/campaign. Quite a big difference. UAW was only referenced in regard to the fact Reveal cited Worksafe in the article, an organization which previously pushed an anti-Tesla PR campaign funded by UAW.

Additionally, the Reveal journalist said on Reddit that many of the people interviewed were indeed "union supporters" (the words Musk specifically used), but also said that not all of them were, such as Tesla's former safety manager.

The "extremist" part may be debatable or an exaggeration, but the other parts had carefully chosen words and were not inaccurate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com