Elon Musk’s anti-union tweet from 2018 must be deleted: U.S. labor board | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk’s anti-union tweet from 2018 must be deleted: U.S. labor board

reuters.com

470 pointssamizdis588 comments

Unpopular opinion and it's not applicable to the US.

Because it's unpopular, it also won't get discussed anywhere... ( My perception could obviously be wrong, bit it would get silenced immediately for bringing it up)

We have a powerfull union here in Belgium ( connections with politics) and since a lot had already accomplished, they keep fighting for ridiculous things for the mere purpose of keeping themselves relevant.

One of their most favorite is classifying teachers as very hard labor. Coming from a background where my dad worked 18/24 and 7/7 that stings. I know multiple teachers and I don't consider that hard labor. It's important labor, yes. But they don't have a lot of stress of other professions, not much working hours and a lot of vacation.

Keeping your course up to date every year is not stressful ( if that even happens. A lot of professors copy-paste their work)

Important note: depending on the students age they teach ( toddlers, middle aged, adults. I do believe it gets harder and they need to add more hours. But classifying everyone as one is a mistake in my POV.

I see you're somewhat bitter about this topic. Is that a good way to present your argument though?

It seems to me that this kind of sentiment ("I've experienced hardships or know people who did, so why does this group deserve better?") is quite prevalent here in germany as well.

I think this is a common trope among richer countries at least, and probably one of the most effective strategies or rhetoric patterns to stall social progress.

Sometimes I'm catching myself thinking along similar lines, and when I do, I'll try to step back and try to examine why I'm having these thoughts, and if there's actually an argument against having changes like this. Is there any disadvantage for me, or for anyone really?

I don't think you understand my point.

Labelling something incorrect is what I l'm suggesting what they are doing. To stay relevant. So members keep paying their member fees.

I'm not saying it has any disadvantages to me and that shouldn't matter at all.

Eg. Teachers here in middle school are labeled as a physical heavy profession and receive advantages.

Explain to me what is exactly physical heavy about teaching.

And it's not just that. Working for the government here in general is labeled like that and it's just a reminder of the past ( in my opinion) to keep their benefits ( early and big pension).

Does that disadvantage me? Yes, because I don't have a physical profession. But neither do they.

I think it's more of an insult to those that actually have a heavy physical profession and have potential health problems because of that.

> But they don't have a lot of stress of other professions

In Ireland there’s a reasonable respect for education – depending on socio-economic background and attitudes young people pick up from their parents – and teaching is still a stressful occupation.

I’ve known a lot of secondary school teachers and unless you’re lucky enough to teach in a well-run school with a majority of students whose parents value education, there’s a huge amount of stress dealing with adolescent behaviour.

In some cases, the teachers are trying to improve the lives of students whose parents who can’t cope because they’re single and struggling to provide for their family and don’t have the time for parenting. In the worst cases, the students have parents who are involved in crime or addicted to drugs.

Bad management of a school by the principal and other administrators can compound. I once lived with a teacher who came home from work crying on a weekly basis because of the abuse she got from anti-social students and the lack of proper disciplinary or management backup meant that the were no serious consequences for abuse of the teacher (or the students who were there to learn). There are many teachers who regularly put up with abuse and harassment that would not be tolerated in any other profession.

The “non-working” hours are spent correcting homework, preparing and refining learning materials, doing administrative paper-work to show what students are attending and/or doing work, follow-up with phone-calls to parents, etc.

I know I wouldn’t want to work as a teacher if the wages were doubled: certainly, the holidays certainly don’t go far enough to balance the day-to-day stress.

BTW, I wouldn’t want to be a nurse either. That’s another profession I have a massive respect for.

> But they don't have a lot of stress of other professions

Well, it's labeled "heavy physical activity". I did say it's important work ( eg. Respectful), I also said that's exactly why it could be political suicide by just mentioning it. I also didn't think I dispresected teachers themselves, but directed more to the unions.

Also, special needs are separated and are also labeled "heavy emotional work" here.

In this case, i'm talking about the heavy physical.

Also, the examples you mentioned:

Correcting homework is to be done during a normal workweek. Since no teacher here stands in class full-time ( ~ 26 hours in general).

Contact with parents is 2 days per year during normal days ( mo-fr)

Administrative paper work is done during class, at the start.

Labor was once fighting for their rights with rifles and unprecedented multicultural unity. Workers knew their enemy very clearly and knew how to attain their goals. The alternative was starvation and corporate enslavement.

Now the concern is deleting tweets. Embourgeoisiement has slowed and confused the struggle of labor. The reckoning of the owner class is long overdue, as evidenced by this typical hubris.

In today's world, this reckoning must be at once international and complete. We have the infrastructure for liberation on a global scale.

Love the wink-wink nudge-nudge hint towards violence typical of the radical left, the planet over. The US is full of refugees from places that fought for 'workers rights' with 'rifles and multicultural unity' and never recovered. Check out all of South America, and even India, former USSR, China, etc.

Employment in the US is totally voluntary, with unemployment one of the lowest in the developed world, immense competition for tech talent, and you think this requires 'reckoning of the owner class' - which is often the SAME workers' 401k accounts?

What exactly is your ideal - that 'workers', who are also 'owners', fight themselves?

It's ironic that these workers "liberation" movements have resulted in the worlds largest slave labor camps and poverty on a scale never seen in free market countries. Not to mention genocide on a scale surpassing the nazis.

Poverty is just another form of slavery. Using your line of hyperbole I could also say the same for any developed capitalist nation.

Now more to your point. The worker movements in the developed west was not shy to use force.

An example in England would be workers marching to a factory owners house demanding better working conditions or else they’d kill him. I believe similar events also happened in the US.

Poverty is not another form of slavery and claiming that downplays in the extreme what slavery actually was. That is absolute nonsense.

[flagged]

Please use good faith arguments.

[flagged]

We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking HN's guidelines. Please don't create accounts to do that with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This is the sort of reply I expect from the more popular subreddits on Reddit, and not HN. I recommend you check out the community guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Interesting, in a way: asking to delete the tweet has likely given it far more audience than it originally had. Streisand effect, maybe?

Isn’t that a good thing? It’s letting both Tesla employees and others know that the threats were empty, unenforceable and illegal.

It’s not like the original tweet wasn’t widely discussed.

Does the First Amendment amount to a fart in a thunderstorm any longer?

If anyone getting paid out of taxpayer funds doesn't grok the Bill of Rights, then their employment is what needs deleting.

I can't tell if you're being intentionally dense. Elon mixing his personal and business facing statements on his personal twitter account were his doing. He can no longer speak as a private citizen about Tesla on his twitter account, period. Anything he tweets is rightfully considered an official statement by a company representative.

By your logic, Elon could tweet Tesla's financial results on twitter during a quiet period before public release "because first amendment". The first amendment doesn't give you carte blanche to break the law without consequence...

> He can no longer speak as a private citizen about Tesla on his twitter account, period. Anything he tweets is rightfully considered an official statement by a company representative.

If equality before the law were a meaningful concept any longer, the distinction between business accounts with SEC constraints as modifying the 1A might be coherent.

These days the government enjoys the tyranny of selective enforcement (e.g. riots vs. "peaceful protests") to the extent that regarding your point as a fair one is challenging.

The first amendment doesn't protect a private company making statements on a private platform

If Elon stood on the street corner shouting lies into a megaphone? Sure, maybe there'd be an argument there

Thats complete nonsense. This isn't the private company making a decision on its platform, this is a government agency forcefully having a tweet removed.

Furthermore, the idea that the federal government can coerce private companies into taking actions which the government is explicitly Constitutionally denied (censorship) is scary in the extreme.

People need to think these things through ahead of them getting too far into Godwin's Law territory.

I wish the NRLB would be much harsher against business owners and executives who engage in anti-union rhetoric and behaviors. People have the right to form unions, lying about losing benefits and lowering pay should be handled much more harshly, there should be actual penalties instead of just having to read a statement and delete a tweet.

I disagree. It should be a free market. If the employees don’t like their treatment they should leave and take a different job. I am sure there is a UAW job out there to be had.

The most likely outcome from this is that Tesla moves more and more production out of a California and into a more business friendly state, such as Texas.

calling it a free market is laughable naive. the market is lopsided in favor of businesses because many laws at the state and federal are explicitly pro-business and anti-union; see "right to work laws", the 1947 Taft-Harley act, etc. - especially over the past 20 years

and saying workers should just go and join a union backed job is even sillier when <15% of all full time workers are apart of a union [1]

[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm

Right to work is pro employee. If unions want membership they shouldn’t be able to coerce it. They should have to earn it and compete for it. If a union can’t survive based on voluntary membership then that tells you something.

Right to work is only anti union because it allows employees to choose whether or not to join a union. Forcing an employee to join a union is absolutely not pro-employee.

Right to work is not pro-business. It simply reduces some of the extra-contractual powers that labor laws give unions.

These laws are violating the right of business to freely contract, while reducing the opportunity for those who don't have unionized jobs to compete for those jobs. So Right to Work is anti-'exploitation of businesses and outside workers'.

So in a "free" market, one side has all the bargaining power and the other side has none of it? What does a free market mean to you?

It means the employees can choose to leave and choose whether they want to join a union.

In the free market, should businesses not be able to freely agree to a contract? Most anti-union laws limit the types of contracts private actors are able to voluntarily consent to, which seems less of a "free market."

Spreading democracy to the workforce does not make the market less "free." It just makes it easier to manipulate by the few.

Democracy in the workforce would be giving employees an option to join a union, or not.

Or Alabama? Which would never get a union...

Unions are an aspect of a free market. They're an organization of individuals with a common goal in exactly the same way corporations are.

Unions are anti-free market. They are monopoly cartels protected by the federal government. If people who sell peanut butter joined together to sell their products at a higher price, the DOJ would bust them up. If people who sell labor join together to do the same type of rent seeking, congress sets up the NLRB to protect them.

This free market you speak of is in fact fairly sensitive to initial conditions, and will never reconcile the interests of the rich and poor on its own.

I'm glad to hear you are calling for employees to be able to freely form a union and strike (which employees are mostly banned from doing today).

The NLRB has jurisdiction in Texas

Where, exactly, are people who live in the SF Bay Area going to find a UAW job?

I mean the quote about options is probably true. It just means employees won't be given any more options.

Unionised workers typically get no or very few stock options compared to industries with no unionisation.

Unionized workers get what they negotiate for. Given how tech works, a Tesla union very well could demand options. It is absolutely false that unionization precludes employees getting options.

Except they usually don't... Unionized industries tend to be adversarial - if the employees get a better deal, then the employer does less well. Therefore receiving options is a poor negotiation tactic.

for behaviours, yes, but for rhetoric, you're toeing a very dangerous line up against the 1st amendment.

The 1st amendment does not and should not apply to business matters. You don't even need to look far from the subject matter, Musk has gotten in trouble before over misleading tweets. I don't see anyone bring up the first amendment when discussing corporate fraud. Why is it that executives can be accountable to shareholders but not workers?

"does not and should not apply to business matters" The problem is this: At what point does something become a "business matter"? And yes, I have opined that the SEC is playing with fire and possibly sowing the seeds of its own irrelevance with it's threats to musk.

Because the workers don't own the company. Accountability to shareholders is built upon ownership.

Hey let’s not make it a freedom of speech issue. If you speak the words “if you what I dislike I’ll beat you up” you’re not asserting a 1A right, you’re just a bully

In the end I think courts will say the promised anti-union rollercoaster and yogurt complexes must be built. Fraudulent promises as part of commerce and labor negotiation are excluded from protection under pretty much every interpretation of the 1st amendment out there.

https://elonmusk.today/#frozen-yogurt-rollercoasters

IANAL, but if it's not in writing, I believe you have to prove that musk never intended to deliver, and that's gonna be hard to prove. Otherwise you can nail people down to a few hundred prosecutable offenses a year and that is not a recipe for social success when there are sufficient numbers of vindictive jerks around.

? Not at all. I'm not quite sure why people on HN think the 1st amendment is such a golden bullet, but it is not. There are lots of exceptions, including threatened retaliation, to what might be permissibly said in the workplace.

If, for instance, as you were hiring people, you told them "we don't hire black people", even if you did hire black people, you would still be opening yourself up to suit, even with freedom of speech.

It's not "free" speech when the audience is being coerced into hearing it.

Before you say it, yes, the workers are being coerced. The implicit threat is that they will lose their jobs if they don't listen to the employer's anti-union rhetoric.

"Oh, but they can just quit and not be forced to listen to it," you say? Well, no, the average American worker can't afford to just walk away from a job. Thus, it's coercion.

Would somebody like to explain how a job is a "free association" for people who may not be able to cover a $400 expense without borrowing money? Or are we just interested in hitting that down arrow hard enough to make it all go away?

Isn't the entire point of a union to give you negotiating leverage?

If you need the government to effectively do the negotiating for you by levying fines and such whenever the company goes against the union, what exactly is the point of the union?

The problem is that collective action is difficult before you have the union, and companies/executives have a lot of power to dissuade people from forming unions. In the past that's involved physical threats and actual violence. Nowadays I expect it's more posturing and economic threats, but they can still have the desired effect.

The point of these sorts of laws is to give unions a fighting chance to take hold in places where employees want them, but are afraid of retaliation if they tried to form one.

Huh?

Don't roads exist to facilitate vehicle transportation? If you need to do construction in order to make roads, what exactly is the point of them?

I don't understand what your thinking here is. You're comparing the expected results of a thing existing with possible actions to facilitate conditions for that thing to exist. Why are these supposed to be somehow equivalent or comparable?

I think their point is that the American form of unionization is bunk. If you look to Europe workers are free to choose between many associations of voluntary unions which advocate for their specific interests. They are not forced to have a single representative for negotiations with their employer and are free to abstain from of participation as well.Much like the American voting system and American Congress, unions are winner take all majority rule. If you are in the minority of a union it may not advocate for your interest and you have no option to turn to.

I guess I don't understand the bad behavior here. Tesla is allowed to not give anything they want to unionized workers.

If you want to force companies to capitulate to unions, cut out the middleman and just force companies to give things directly to workers.

The union doesn’t exist yet at their site. The government provides the guarantee of a fair election on whether to unionize, free of threats from either management or the union. Once the site is unionized, the union can indeed defend itself by negotiating with management.

I guess businesses don't need the government laws enforcing shareholder voting rights and minority shareholder protections then right?

No absolutely the government should enforce legal agreements via the legal system.

But that's not what this is suggesting, right? This is suggesting the government should treat unions preferentially, not equitably.

The governments role should be to ensure a level playing field between employers and labor. That means the government at a minimum needs to protect those who want to organize.

How is anyone buying into the complete false statement/propaganda that what Elon said is a threat?

Has anyone commenting here even read Elon's tweet in question?

"Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union. Could do so tmrw if they wanted. But why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing? Our safety record is 2X better than when plant was UAW & everybody already gets healthcare." - Elon, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/998454539941367808

Edit to add: lots of Elon hate blocking critical thinking here on HN.

>"Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union. Could do so tmrw if they wanted. But why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing? Our safety record is 2X better than when plant was UAW & everybody already gets healthcare." - Elon, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/998454539941367808

This is literally textbook union busting BS. It's been the same line for 200 years.

> This is literally textbook union busting BS.

So any CEO saying that unions aren't wanted is "union busting"? This just seems like watering down the word until it means almost nothing.

There was a time when "union busting" meant literally busting striking member's heads.

Private companies are allowed to negotiate with unions, no? That's the point of a union - to have an organizational body that allows members to vote. All Elon is saying is that Tesla won't be providing stock options to a union. The union could still strike if they don't get what they want - but this being considered a threat or union busting is akin to a temper tantrum because you don't like that something you're currently getting (candy<->stock) then you'll no longer get.

I think the threat is that union members wouldn't get stock options.

It wasn’t a threat: UAW has never allowed that type of compensation in a union contract, and have specifically blocked attempts to tie compensation to performance in the past.

The point of the tweet is that Tesla workers are already treated better than their UAW counterparts. Why let the UAW come in and screw it up?

That's not a threat - that's called pointing out a fact, it's called reasoning, that employees would be doing themselves when balancing out the pros and cons; just because Elon's pointing out pros and cons doesn't make something a threat. The employees and union still have the ability to decide based on pros and cons.

This is being warped and a lack of reasoning at the same level of absurdity as changing master-slave language in programming to shallowly appeal/respond to racism issues.

Why would they not get stock options? Sounds like a punishment for voting union?

Punishment? It's negotiation. It's Elon stating that Tesla won't be putting stock options on the table, but a union still could then negotiate - they could potentially negotiate to refuse to work unless they're getting stock but it sounds like Tesla is drawing the line there because they believe that their stock is valuable and will become much more valuable; employees will have to decide for themselves if they want to risk potentially losing out on getting stocks and weigh if that's valuable enough for them for whatever else the union may or may not be able to negotiate. Arguably, as Elon said, they haven't unionized yet because of that potential loss - but it's not a threat, and arguably the employees are smart enough to decide for themselves.

That’s exactly the kind of thing that’s forbidden under the law. You can’t threaten to take a current benefit off the table if employees unionize.

So if I tell you that you can join a union but if you do you won't get stock options, then I have negotiated with you?

You can then refuse to work, as a group, and that will apply pressure to Tesla.

I think the devil is in the details here. Is he saying that if people unionize they don't get stock options? Why is that? Is it a threat?

No, it's a fact - pros and cons. Tesla has no obligation to provide stock to employees - and so employees/unions get to decide what is the better potential option for them - and I suppose it's a risk for employees to unionize if they will no longer then be getting stock; unless a union somehow can force Tesla to give X stock to unionized employees, I don't know all nor have I thought through all possibilities - so there's possibly nuance missing but Elon's tweet itself isn't a threat.

Threat's the wrong word but purposefully misused, even if it causes fear or rather it will cause a fear of a sense of loss of value - because if employees value owning/gaining Tesla stock over whatever else they potentially could negotiate through a union, then there's certainly a fear of potential loss - but Elon pointing out that possibility isn't a threat itself.

Title is misleading. The tweet wasn't just voicing an anti-union opinion, Musk was actively threatening employees who tried to join unions.

Calling this tweet "anti-union" seems like spin. It is pointing out facts that one might want to consider before deciding to unionize. The fact that employees lose stock options when they unionize isn't so much a threat as it is a fact about how unions work because historically unions are against any kind of incentive or merit pay so they refuse options as compensation. It is a fact that UAW hasn't negotiated options as part of the pay for it's members at any of the other companies where it represents workers.

I'm a very pro-union guy, so I'll give my five cents just for the sake of discussion:

Firstly, I don't know the context in which this was tweeted, but looking at it, it's not in my opinion egregiously or "obviously" anti-union, but the definition of this is of course a legal one and not a subjective one, so it doesn't really matter what any of us "think" is anti-union, what matters is the legal text in the region where it is tried. With that said, I'd also like to state my opinion that I think it's at least quite unprofessional for any senior executive to voice any kind of anti-union sentiment regardless of how mild it is, I would expect that both parties keep to certain standards of discussion and avoiding bad faith, which in my mind means not discarding the entire raison d'être of the other party.

Secondly, pointing out that unions are opposed to individualized salary negotiations is hardly a criticism of unions as much as it is a statement of fact. If the unions cannot meet this point in debate but need to revert to legal action, I think that speaks to the sad state of pro-union ideology today.

I have a nuanced opinion on unions after dealing with a bunch of them in a former life as a construction inspector / structural engineer (EIT).

Some unions are great. IBEW Local 353 comes to mind. The best unions have slogans like "when the boss is well paid, we get what we want in negotiations" and the worst unions have essentially the opposite mindset. I've literally seen members from ATU Transit Union Local 113 throw an empty coffee cup on the ground during a nighttime subway construction project and say "job creation" during their duties.

There is a right way to do unions and a wrong way. Germany seems to get this better than North America. Too often in North America things get divided into pro-this or anti-that, instead of being a discussion on how to do something right or how to properly align incentives so that the right outcome happens.

I'm not anti-union. I like the protection that some unions provide their workers; especially in specialized, high risk trades like welding or electrical. That said, I don't think Tesla would be Tesla with a heavy union throwing unnecessary delays around. Their safety record is quite good and their compensation is better than average even without the stellar stock performance. Before advocating that Tesla should unionize I'd prefer to see structural changes in unionization come to North America so that we have an environment that fosters a healthier relationship between employer and union. I don't want every North American company rusting away like Detroit.

You're talking about whether the most visible champion of Dogecoin, whose formal title at his company is Techking, and who added a fart-on-demand feature to his products, and saying that one of his tweets regarding a currently non-existent party, a Tesla union organization, is unprofessional.

Labels like "unprofessional" are repugnant to some people, because they have been, and continue to be, used to justify arbitrary application of personal taste and frankly BS in the workplace, for example to bully people into wearing neckties.

I doubt this is a good standard to go for when trying to engage Elon. I do understand however that it's your opinion — no argument that you are free to it, and I even think it's productive to air it… in part because it gives people like me a chance to offer a counter perspective.

> I doubt this is a good standard to go for when trying to engage Elon

I agree, it's a much better to cut through the BS and go straight for the time that Musk and Tesla tried to have a former employee murdered by the police by accusing them of being a mass shooter[1] all because Musk thought the employee was a whistleblower for public safety.

I think that incident illustrates Musk's attitude towards Tesla employees well.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-13/when-elon...

> You're talking about whether the most visible champion of Dogecoin, whose formal title at his company is Techking, and who added a fart-on-demand feature to his products, and saying that one of his tweets regarding a currently non-existent party, a Tesla union organization, is unprofessional.

You bring up a good point here and I think it applies to all of his ventures: Why trust anything the guy does?

However, when it comes to safety, the public must have trust. Very solid trust. Because 2+ tons of car at 70mph that claims to steer itself cannot be untrusted.

It's wise not to trust fast moving heavy objects, yes.

There's something to be said for a hybrid of human and machine attention though. From real world personal experience, there are some safety advantages.

In your opinion is what Elon said in the tweet by definition a threat?

I don't see why my personal opinion matters, but even if it does I don't have enough context to understand his tweet. He said:

What does he mean by "giving up stock options"?

They won't have access to stock options if they make a decision to unionize.

It's simple but people seem to be trying to make it seem convoluted to try to maintain confusion to make it look like they have a case to call it a threat. It's ridiculous.

The actual solution in fact is to take the burden off of employers: we need adequate UBI so people don't need to work to survive (including covered healthcare etc), therefore if a company isn't treating or paying their workers adequately for the work at hand then they can simply stop working there - and that is them taking a stand against the company; taking income is also problematic - you're penalizing work getting done, instead a VAT on production is much better method of skimming off some value created to redistribute back into society; feed some of the ROI back into society, fuel the largest cog of capitalism - consumers - via UBI - and the system, society, will thrive.

Weather unions would be anti stock option or not is debatable, certainly not a fact, and the tweet is absolutely clear cut a threat that workers would lose them if they unionized independent of what the union would do.

Can you cite any instance where a union representing blue collar workers has negotiated stock options or similar stock based compensation as part of their member's pay package?

Maybe someone else finds something more recent, but it looks like 20 years ago, unions got options at about half the rate of non union (table 1).

https://smlr.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/documents/facul...

That doesn't really say much, since non-union labor is usually better compensated, in general.

Can you cite any instance where a union representing blue collar workers who already have stock options or similar stock based compensation as part of their member's pay package has lost them in negotiation?

(I have a gripe with the stock market so take this post with a grain of salt)

idk. In my experience I would much rather get payed for my work in money I can use immediately, rather then being forced to play a game in a system I don’t believe in. I’ve worked for a few companies which gave me stock options (one of them was really good) and in practice what you end up getting is less then a month salary at best. I think companies love to give stock options because it adds bells and whistles to your benefits, it looks like they are giving you more then they are. If I had a choice I would much rather see my salary go up as the company raises in value then to be handed out stock.

That said, I’m not well versed in union logic so I don’t know if this is the reason why unions are against this practice. I am just glad they are.

Correlation is not causation, and in this case it’s a stretch to argue that’s what he was saying. “Don’t vote union, you’ll have to move to Detroit!”

Has anyone seen joining unions actually cause positions that got stock to stop getting stock? Is this like an overwhelmingly common thing I don’t know about?

It's a made up lie. Actors are in a union and they get profit-sharing and individual performance-based pay.

> Has anyone seen joining unions actually cause positions that got stock to stop getting stock? Is this like an overwhelmingly common thing I don’t know about?

It's an overt threat. Tesla has used it's stock compensation as a weapon against employees in the past. There are countless examples of people being fired days/weeks before stock options vested, essentially a form of wage theft:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-19/tesla-wor... https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/01/tesla-p... https://www.reddit.com/r/RealTesla/comments/iiwuxr/she_moved...

It's so odd that one of the key aspects of socialism is workers owning the means to production (the company).

...and one of the main things Unions prevent - is employee ownership in the company. Crazy.

Try explaining that to the people downvoting and commenting where I point this out - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26602600

There is a federal board that makes people delete tweets?

There are limits to free speech. In particular, threatening to do illegal things is often borderline, and can itself be a crime.

It makes sense to ask the individual directly to delete a Tweet deemed illegal, since Twitter seems to not act within the laws of their country.

Working in France completely changed my view of unions.

I sure hope the horrors I saw won’t happen to Tesla.

The horrors of... a 35 hour workweek, 5 weeks paid vacation, 16 weeks paid maternity leave, universal healthcare, and no at-will employment?

or the deadwood that gets protected because they belong to an union. Or unions being against remote work because that'd reduce employee control. Or union leadership just using their membership to laze around. Or union opposing projects they don't like. Or union harassing (including physically) managers. And to say nothing of railway union who apparently have a Mission to gridlock the country every few years (usually around the time someone in the government check the deficits of the railways)

Even if all of these were true (I would describe most of them as a mischaracterization at best), do you honestly think that outweighs everything that I described? The worst thing that people can say about unions is they are bureaucratic and inconvenient. The worst things people can say about, say, working conditions in many non-unionized American workplaces are far, far worse. People dying, unfairly losing their job (and healthcare, and home), working incredibly long hours, unable to see their kid, unable to get adequate sleep, etc etc etc. I happen to think there are values other than "workers producing profit for their employers as efficiently as possible at the expense of anything else"

> The worst thing that people can say about unions is they are bureaucratic and inconvenient.

I disagree. Unions can lead to the death of entire industries - I have seen it with my own eyes. Inefficiencies created by unions lead to jobs going to places where such unions do not exist. Personally, I do believe the workers need to be protected, but if you protect workers then you also need to protect industries, and this opens a gigantic can of worms as it runs counter to globalization and free trade.

I'd say that, yes, work laws are better in France than in the US, it's rather obvious, but I can't say that the unions in France are a net good.

Also something I forgot to yesterday: unions that prevents downsizing or restructuring efforts to tackle industry changes, ending by killing the companies in question. Or, when a falling factory is about to be bought, imposing such constraints that all deal fall trough.

There's also 'bossnapping': https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-bossnapping-idUSBR...

I'm not sure I'd characterize this as anything reasonable. At what point does this warrant self defense by the people stuck?

Great way to talk about your fellow colleagues as dead wood. I would love working with you.

Working together isn’t fun when we’re all out of a job because the factory moved to another country

I assume they're not just talking about all of their colleagues, but specifically the ones that don't pull their own weight.

If you don't pull your own weight, then I would love working with you.

You forget, with a union, the world's richest man might get richer every day at a slightly slower rate than he currently gets richer. That's the real horror!

Why does it have to be zero sum?

Your power in society is zero sum. Giving it all away to an oligarch in exchange for promises of cheap consumer goods is not an credible bargain.

What riches, exactly? Why the hate?

I'm not sure why people hate unions exactly. Seems weird to have "freedom of assembly" but then hate those that practice it for better negotiating leverage.

There is reason US is very competitive globally vs France just the shell of its former glory

The former glory was holding colonies by considerable violence. If unions are the ones who stopped it, good. Through I strongly doubt unions had anything to do with that.

Yes. Geography

Really ? Working more has nothing to do with it ? Or brilliant universities ? Or immigration ?

Ah, classic selection bias blinders on. Sure, great benefits for those who have jobs. What about for the people who can't get employed due to the conditions on labor? The young, poor, already jobless? Not so much concern for them, you got yours.

unlike the US, where working conditions for the poor are fantastic?

Don't get me wrong, France (and the EU) has its share of problems. But "better protections for their workers" is not one of them. EU countries decided to use a small portion of their enormous wealth building a safety net and decent worker protections. The US does this to a much lesser degree, preferring instead to center corporate profits and the wealthy.

This part. People point to things like wealth inequality but not point to median incomes or employment rates, or marriage rates or birth rates. its extreme selection bias. If france was a country its median income with be comparable with alabama.

This is not a particularly useful statistic unless you include the varying levels of public services.

I just did a similar analysis for a job in the US vs one in Canada. The actual salary in the US was much higher, but including healthcare expenses closed a lot of the gap. In some cases (e.g., chronic illness or young kids), the lower Canadian salary was a better "deal" overall.

I'm not sure how COVID has effected it, but for the past years France has had a higher prime age labor force participation rate then the US, so it doesn't seem to be causing that issue.

This could be describing any country on the planet.

Shantytowns have been growing across the US for almost 30 years.

Unions are just formalized reality, like fiscal economics, politics, etc

IMO, while we may not live to see it, I’m pretty sure out last 100-150 years of economic thought is, big picture style, on its way out.

It may take decades but once everyone is a gig worker, the political argument for universal healthcare will be undeniable.

IMO that’s more in-line with someone like Adam Smith, whose only condition for a market was free movement of workers between a market of opportunity.

This has somehow been mutated into a market of goods and services, probably out of laziness.

I am not sure the American underclass (a large part of Trump’s support base) is faring much better. Even with larger unemployment, inequalities are still not as bad as in the US. Several countries have similar problems, whether it takes the form of 10% unemployment or working-class poor.

The horrors of unions to me are represented perfectly in teachers unions, which repeatedly protect sexual predators and incompetent teachers [1] [2]. They serve their members to the detriment of everyone else, including the children they claim to care about (while enabling predators).

In fact, teachers are significantly more likely to be predators than even priests. [3] Thanks to unions who go to bat for them.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390443437504577547...

[2] https://www.nj.com/education/2017/12/teachers_accused_of_sex...

[3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/has-media-ignored-sex-abuse-in-...

Can you elaborate? Because for me, working in scandinavia, unions looked quite useful and reasonable.

I had this naive image in mind that unions are labor activists mobilizing against exploitative corporate practices. What I witnessed opened my eyes to the realities on ground, that seemed like almost opposite. As usual, life is more complicated!

* The objective of trade unions is not to protect workers and improve their conditions (at least directly). It’s to protect themselves.

* In every organization, there exists people with diverse attributes: capabilities, attitudes towards work/life, etc. There are always people who don’t want to or can’t work; and guess what they do? They join unions to protect themselves. Over time union center became international house of suckers and weirdos, each worse than the other.

* In an effort to protect themselves, unions politicized the work environment. They put themselves everywhere in key committees, including a union committee having last word on hirings and firings. That made them unfirable. They exploited the coronavirus situation, to blame employers and opponents. A scientific project can become a playground for union politics. I believe in climate change, but not in politicizing it. They seize every opportunity to attack employers and those not aligned with them. The goal is to use any chance to perpetuate an image that they protect people.

* Union will plot against any excellence in organization. To minimize contrast, they work hard to fail good people and projects around, or portray them as worker-abusers (ie, the reason that they succeed is because they abuse people).

* Unions will fiercely defend status quo and do not allow any constructive reform. The area of specialty that they advertised for themselves was an ancient technology from 1980s (and even that they wouldn’t do it). Every time people suggested to reform the department activities, they refused the proposals. You may not believe it, but department told them, OK, you can keep doing your own activities, we don’t reform them, but other people can start projects in orthogonal directions not related to yours. They still refused (they didn’t want competition) and basically forced everyone to work on their ancient advertised area of activity.

* Union engaged in all sorts of abusive practices. It was disgusting to see a lot of them rarely showed up at work (which was strange considering that they put themselves in various committees). I asked a department manager (“responsable”) how come this or that guy shows up at work only few times a year. He said, if you are a known member of union you can do that, and this is an issue in France. They yell, and bully people, create a toxic environment for others, repel and fire those not blending in etc,

* Union members felt very entitled and justified their actions by making themselves believe a skewed view of the world. They felt that they are entitled to a life even with ZERO work, and world owes to them.

* Unions will be perpetually on strike. What makes you think they will be happy with a laid back 9-5 job with decent pay and great benefits? Even with no work, they still go on strikes. They take tax money from society with little contribution, and make your commute and life periodically miserable.

* Unions are especially problematic in public sector, where incentives are aligned with cronyism not meritocracy. A lot of people are hired who lack abilities to perform the work in question. They form large powerful unions.

Don’t get me wrong. There might be a place for “traditional” textbook unions. But I don’t know if it ever works in practice. My experience was negative and counterintuitive.

Germany's workforce in automotive and many other industries is HIGHLY unionized.

I've never heard of these people being lazy, not wanting to work etc.

In fact German engineering is the envy of the world!

VW, Mercedes, BMW, Porsche all German engineered and manufactured by heavily unionized workforces!

Sounds like your anecdotal bad experience with unions is not representative of reality.

And FWIW I can list you just as many terrible anecdotes about how awful business managers are...

You know what they also all of in common? Zero innovation since decades.

And German car engineering is mostly known for being overly complicated, I say that as a German.

>VW, Mercedes, BMW, Porsche all German engineered and manufactured by heavily unionized workforces!

Sure, but for each of those there are 10-100 other smaller companies in automotive or other industries that don't have unions, and some German companies have stirred up quite a few scandals of not following the employment laws or abusing their workforce, which coincidentally was mostly immigrants.

Cherry picking the big, wealthy car brands to represent the manufacturing industry is like cherry picking FAANG for representing the software dev industry.

It's likely not as bad as in France, but in a shifting economy, German unions are still hurting the manufacturers. Just last year they got the CEO of Volkswagen fired for wanting to invest massively in electric cars. Workers specialized in ICE drivetrains can't have that. Much easier to block the innovation at board level than to retrain. That will go on until somehow union dominance is overcome or the companies are dead in the water against new competitors.

I actually read your comment in good faith expecting to see some actual union-specific critiques, but it is just an absurdly biased caricature of the very worst of people and motives who exist in every type of organisation.

Having read it, I now don't believe for one minute you "had a naive image in mind" before or "opened your eyes" after your experience.

Power in all forms corrupts whether its corporate, governmental, or union. No organization of humans is free of these sorts of things which is why individual freedoms are important. OP's naivety was the ignorance of the aforementioned condition of human organizations.

Going through all of your point, it felt like every “unions” mention could be replaced with “management”.

Protecting themselves ? check. Politicized the work environment ? check. Abusive practices ? check. Skewed view of the world and cronyism ? check.

I think what you are seeing is just a reflection of who succeeds in French companies. Some chose unions, some management, some find other niches, but none of these seem attached to specific values to me.

You're right about that, but I want to support the original commenter a bit and point out that management isn't going away, and adding unions on top of that is not an improvement if they share the same flaws.

This is the kicker with every one of these discussions, really.

The ceiling on bad behavior is set by management, because they can do all of those bad things people claim unions do, and more - right now. The union gives you recourse

There is a solution to this; the union has become a parasitic entity between the labour pool and the employers right, so you can just legislate their ostensible raison d'être out of existence. That is, enforce fair conditions upon employers at a government level. Then encourage every person to leave their union, because they have no need anymore. Obviously, requires a high integrity government, actual fair enforcement against all parties etc.

Also requires knowing what those employees actually want.

So let me get this straight. You are opposed to workers organizing, because in doing so the unions might show some of the same problems that are already an issue in organizations and the ownership which is naturally always organized.

Seem like a strawman, worker conditions are light years ahead where workers are organized.

You sound like someone arguing against companies or capitalism because tax evasion exists saying “maybe there’s a case for textbook capitalism but in reality it doesn’t work” when we have literal proof that not capitalism and unions work. Nothing is perfect and ofcause unions can be better and companies can as well. But the net effect of unions is positive, and they form naturally in every place where you don’t allow anti-union policies and anti union worker discrimination.

What was your job in france that gave you this experience?

It was at a university and the union is called in France CGT.

The basic problem is, if we have such powerful semi-paralegal entity (considering its scope and power), it protects people in need, but what mechanisms do we have in place to prevent it from evolving into an entity protecting itself (or to a mixed state), attracting those with perverse incentives in addition to those in need?

I agree with comments above. I wouldn’t say we should rush to dismiss unions. It probably depends on a lot of factors, eg, on country and how it’s set up. However, we need to recognize that this is an organization functioning like any other, eg, a bank, it has internal motives and can, and will, use its concentrated power to produce good and bad results. We probably need a balanced approach, and checks ...

And yet, the level of inequity in france is nowhere near as much as USA.

Sure there arn't as many mega rich, but then there arn't people hundreds of thousands of people being bankrupted by medical bills either.

Given that the yellow vest protests have been going on for two and a half years now, I would not hold up France as a model for income equality. The U.S. may be a decade in advance of most countries in this respect, but there's no indication I can find that France has the problem solved with its approach.

> there's no indication I can find that France has the problem solved with its approach

They certainly haven’t. However, the yellow vests movement fizzled out a long time ago. And union-bashing certainly isn’t the way to go if you care about equality, however imperfect they are.

Unions in France also are kinda racist; those shut out of the union system, that is menial workers, don't have a path into the same protections that unionised workers have.

The middle class is also much, much poorer.

So? How's their quality of life?

Depends how you define equitable. Equity isn't just the GINI coefficient, it's also about social mobility. France is pretty spectacular in how the GINI coefficient is fairly low, but social mobility is arguably lower than it in more fiscally 'unequal' societies like the USA.

How is being bankrupted by medical bills relevant to unions?

The weakness of the latter directly contributes to the former.

I thought there are 'out of pocket maximums' set by the government to avoid that? The most that individuals will have to pay out-of-pocket in 2020 is $8,200 and $16,400 for families.

>The most that individuals will have to pay out-of-pocket in 2020 is $8,200 and $16,400 for families.

If you have good insurance, sure. If you're unemployed, one bad illness or injury means instant bankruptcy.

There's a huge set of caveats for the maximum out-of-pocket. The maximum is only for "in network" care. You can very easily end up with out-of-network care for various reasons (including going to an in-network hospital but being treated by a doctor who is out-of-network without being informed of this fact). Maximum out-of-pocket for out-of-network is $40k per person per year on my insurance.

We have ACA now, anyone can get affordable insurance.

To put that in context, in the UK the average wage is £38k (we have a much wider distribution than on the continent)

The most we'd pay in tax is £8k: https://listentotaxman.com/38000?

that covers all our health insurance as well. There is no copay, there are no "your condition isn't covered anymore". The only issue now is wait times, but thats because we're balls deep in a pandemic.

There are unions in the US too.. My wife's workplace got unionized... initially the salaries increase a few percents but after that, it didn't appear to make that much of a difference.

In Eastern Canada our unions have become problematic too, though they're not as vile as France's.

My first experience were of course were teachers. At least half of them hates children but love being the boss in the room. Most of them quit before because obtaining their seniority, and they tend to be the more conscientious ones. In 6th grade I had a teacher fired because she physically assaulted me multiple times by hitting me on the arms, during most of the scholar year. Did I say fired? No sorry, only unpaid leave for one week, and she was replaced by none other than... her son, because seniority I guess. In primary school our physical education teachers were obese.

The whole region (multiple cities in a rural area) where I grew up saw auto dealerships workers on strike / lock out for years. It began at the end of high school, at the end of university it was still going on 5~6 years later.

My first ever was in a grocery store, I was fired because "finally the union wants that job".

Stories I've heard from others abound: solder a lose component on a PCB? That's tech's job. Caught talking to a union member alone? Let's just say if having half the people you meet giving you death stares not enough, then be ready to defend yourself against all paranoid claims made against you. Army sub-contractors caught stealing gas masks and laptops by MPs?? Nah, "you have to build a file before firing them". People who did the coop programs (5 paid internships) in unionized organizations came back with quite a few horror stories of their own.

The worse is that we're forced to join and pay (at least software is pretty much free from unions), so much for liberty of association. Most votes are held with show of hands. They can be done secretly, but the vote to do that is also a show at hand, good luck being "that guy" who defies the executives' wishes for a strike when the war chess is full. And that's not even mentioning the various corruption scandals involving intimidation, threats of violence and organized crime.

There's a place for unions since companies have an inherent organizational advantage. But they always seem to spin out of control.

Unions work very differently in France compared to the U.S.

Employees don't even decide if they want unions or not.

dang, can we change the link/title to https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL4N2LN4L0 ?

Snippet below:

> Tesla CEO Musk's anti-union tweet from 2018 must be deleted: U.S. labor board

> Tesla Inc Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk’s 2018 tweet threatening employees would lose their stock options if they formed a union was illegal and should be deleted, the U.S. National Labor Relations Board said on Thursday.

Aside from "watchdog" as opposed to NLRB, what's wrong with the title? The article describes a bunch of required actions besides just deleting the tweet.

Not the original commenter, but personally, omitting NLRB would be my main concern with the title. A "watchdog" seems needlessly vague as it could imply any range of organizations that report on this, but the NLRB is the specific agency tasked with overseeing and enforcing these union representation laws on a federal level.

I thought the register article was written in a clickbait way.

Reuters actually had the scoop over 24 hours before the register.

Completely agree, the use of watchdog here as opposed to “federal labor law board” is problematic vagueness

The action desribed in that tweet would be illegal, but is the tweet itself illegal? Why should the tweet be deleted? I'd rather keep it for posterity.

If I happen to mention to you that it would be a shame if my associates and I were to decide to burn your nice little business down in the night, but maybe if you pay us that won't happen I would assume that you would know that a threat was being made. The arson is illegal, but so is the threat to commit it unless you do something that is to my material benefit.

It's very often illegal to threaten illegal retribution. Employees may not know their rights, and such a threat could discourage them from exercising those rights.

Deleting the tweet is maybe not ideal. Any future viewers of it should have the context added that it's an illegal threat.

I would say what happens to the tweet itself is almost an afterthought—it was one of only many violations addressed by the report, along with more mundane stuff, like contract provisions about employees speaking to the press (ruling: it's unlawful to prevent employees from speaking with the press as long as they make it clear they don't represent the company). The NLRB also required them to post notices addressing the tweet at all factories, and it was immortalized in a 55 page public document—not to mention all of the contemporaneous news reports. I think it's very safe to say that posterity is not going to have a hard time finding this tweet

Threatening retaliation is also very much illegal, ergo yes the tweet is illegal.

Why don't you just make a new post with the article that you like? maybe it will take-off...

people need to look at the AmazonNews twitter handle, spews corpo BS at every turn almost like some intern got hold of that account

From the @AmazonNews Twitter[1]:

> You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us. The truth is that we have over a million incredible employees around the world who are proud of what they do, and have great wages and health care from day one.

Meanwhile, The Intercept has mountains of evidence that Amazon itself knows that its workers pee in bottles[2].

It's so blatant that I thought the account was a parody, but it's real.

[1] https://twitter.com/amazonnews/status/1374911222361956359

[2] https://theintercept.com/2021/03/25/amazon-drivers-pee-bottl...

I just found out about that account yesterday and it took me a minute to realise it’s not an onion spinoff.

To me it feels more like some executive on cocaine found out the Twitter password.

is this from https://twitter.com/kenklippenstein/status/13755366054154936... ?

Yup. Also see his article with screenshots backing up the pissing in the bottle claim: https://theintercept.com/2021/03/25/amazon-drivers-pee-bottl...

100% sure that wouldn't have happened if that tweet from @amazonnews didn't piss off some Amazon employee. They're really not doing themselves any favours by letting whoever posted those tweets to tweet from their official account.

Honest question: what's wrong with these tweets?

Sounds to me more like someone who thoroughly enjoys the taste of boot leather.

They pretty beautifully baited Sen. Elizabeth Warren into running her mouth today. She wrote -

"I'll fight to break up Big Tech so you’re not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets."

If she brings an anti-trust suit against them, it will be so easy for Amazon's lawyers to argue that she is only doing so to violate their first amendment rights, which she full out admitted to today.

They baited Warren by lying about the fact that Amazon warehouse / delivery employees have to urinate in bottles to meet deadlines?

The tweets from their account caused significant negative press for Amazon on news and social media across the world.

Amazon is a global company, this kind of disdain for employees isn't looked upon as favourably in other countries. It's bad for business.

Especially from an official PR channel.

> the fact that Amazon warehouse / delivery employees have to urinate in bottles to meet deadlines?

Amazon does not want its employees to piss into bottles. But sometimes employees (predominantly male I hope) do piss into bottles, because they did not plan correctly, or just had to go while on the road. If caught, these employees (and their managers) are then reprimanded. If they get a chance to defend themselves, of course they claim it was due to the deadline, not poor planning or bladder control or uncommon hygiene ethics.

Amazon factually states: Hey, if we required our employees to pee into bottles to meet deadlines, do you seriously think people would work for us, and not 100s of other low-paid jobs which don't have that medieval requirement?

Politicians: Hey, this you?! I have lots of pictures of bottles with piss! Where is your snotty reply now? You say that your employees do not have to piss into bottles, so how come I have those pictures?! Huh?!

It is embarrassing to both sides. Especially for official government employees (who also don't have to pee into bottles to meet deadlines, but I am sure you can turn up at least some pictures: if not, find any traces of cocaine use in the Capitol, then posit that the US congress have their senators use cocaine in the toilet to meet deadlines. Or, you know, bi-partisan plan to have low-skilled employees share in the American dream made possible by Amazon, but I guess that does not fit inside a tweet).

Amazon doesn’t come out of this looking good either, but it’s pretty bad for a Senator to go around telling people that she’ll break up your company if you “heckle” her with “snotty tweets”.

I don't care who was "baited"

A US Senator threatening to retaliate and break-up a business because she didn't like tweets about her is straight-up authoritarian thuggery.

It's the same shit Trump used to do but when Liz does it...well it's GREAT, she's "fighting for the working class"

Breaking up Big Tech isn’t an idle threat from Warren. It was an explicit part of her platform when running for president. She has always believed that some companies run afoul of anti-trust laws.

This far predates a spat with an Amazon twitter handle

https://2020.elizabethwarren.com/toolkit/break-up-big-tech

Yes, she's long pushed for it, but today she said she would so it so that they wouldn't heckle public officials.

That's a huge difference.

Senators don't bring antitrust suits against anyone, as far as I know. That would be a separate branch of government.

But they can engage in virtue signaling like the rest of us.

But in all seriousness, it would be optimal for a society that values liberty and freedom to move away from platforms to standards. No need to breakup FANGS if NIST or something similar defines qualitative API standards for social networks, or more broadly societal network services. And this will also be a huge boon for the startup space and true non-predatory innovation in the virtual services space.

Senators can pass laws increasing the grounds for antitrust actions.

That won't work, because she's been talking about breaking up Amazon for years now.

> "I'll fight to break up Big Tech so you’re not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets."

I thought I liked her policies but this sounds authoritarian. I'd prefer politicians stay tf off twotter unless they got the stomach for it. They're speaking about "authenticity" and the problem of people hiding behind handles whenever given the chance. But they are themselves only interested in "engineering consent" for those who bankrolled their move into office. The consensus should be that they have to be able to put up with a very wide variety of opinions (and most certainly the "snooty" kind).

holy fucking shit... https://twitter.com/AmazonNews you are right. woah.

they are scared. they are really scared.

it's like amazon entire business model is based on exploitation of labor.

>it's like amazon entire business model is based on exploitation of labor

Wait till you find out how the electronics and clothes in your house are made and how the materials they're made from are sourced or what the workforce that picks the fruit and vegetables you see in the supermarket, endures.

It is rarely (never?) discussed in the west how all the consumer goods are cheap simply because the supply chain relies on poor exploitable people and exploiting the environment.

All we hear about is the positive spin, how capitalism and globalization have blessed us with cheap goods and how those poor farmers halfway around the world now have paying jobs, woo-hoo!

> rarely (never?) discussed in the west

I don't know, I see it talked about all the time, but nobody seems to be able to do anything about it.

The percentage of humans living in poverty around the world has never been lower [0]. How is that just spin?

I also can’t relate to your “all we hear about” point at all. I feel like I really have to go out of my way to find any discussion about anything good in the world, the vast majority of what I hear is negative takes like yours about how everything is horrible and everyone is oppressed.

[0] https://data.worldbank.org/topic/11

Wait till you find out that they have a twitter handle & department for Public Policy as well. Why does a global e-commerce giant even need one unless they want to lobby/pressurise politicians & govt's altogether

https://twitter.com/amazon_policy

Labor board joins the chat

Labor Board: Quick, hide the evidence before we have to do more work.

If they want to work for the UAW, then they should join GM or other factories. Why join Tesla if you really wanted to work for the UAW?

You started a generic ideological flamewar with this comment. Please don't do that. They're repetitive, predictable, and tedious—and inevitably turn nasty.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That logic doesn't hold if you share a belief in Tesla's stated mission "to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport", and also want to be in a union -- which is a reasonable set of beliefs and desires to hold.

And I don't see how unions would be intrinsically incompatible with Tesla's mission or operations. There's no reason I know of to hold that it is an immutable fact that Tesla's workers are non-union -- so why shouldn't someone join Tesla and attempt to unionize.

Unionizing Tesla would almost certainly not "accelerate the advent of sustainable transport". More likely cause it to wither and stagnate for the gain of a privileged few as we saw with GM et al.

All German car manufacturers are heavily unionized. VW has one of the strongest unions in Germany and is one of the largest car manufacturers in the world.

That's fine for companies in industries that are reasonably mature. But if you want to start a new company in a dynamic industry, Germany is very much not where you want to be.

German GDP per capita is about 45k, as compared to 65k per capita in the US. But that hides a lot. Germany's most productive city is Berlin. Berlin's GDP per capita is....45k. The US on the other hand has cities like San Francisco, with a GDP per capita of 98k, fully 2x that of Germany's best city.

That isn't an accident. Germany and most of Europe have no tech sector to speak of as a direct consequence of their labor and regulatory policies. The EU is a huge economic block, comparable in scale collectively to the US or China, and it has a highly educated population. And yet, it has near zero presence in the most important industry of the 21st century. That's a staggering indictment of their economic policy. 2nd and 3rd tier US cities have more tech than Europe does.

Tesla would never have gotten off the ground anywhere in the EU, and our climate change prospects would be a lot worse off for it. If we want to solve the major problems facing the world, it's going to require major innovation, and that isn't going to come from EU style market regulation.

That's true, but you also have to keep in mind that German unions are not quite like their American counterparts.

Unions in Germany are very different from unions in the U.S.

U.S. unions are much more adversarial, seeing themselves as the enemy of management. In fact it is illegal for a member of management to be in a union in the U.S.

In Germany, unions hold board seats and see themselves more as partners, invested in the overall success of the business. The principle of codetermination means that union members can be in management. In Germany, unions are much closer to trade organizations or professional organizations, rather than the worker-management divide in the U.S.

In terms of politics, it's hard to be cognitively captured by the whole "greedy corporations oppressing workers" meme when you are sitting on the board and realize that your livelihood depends on the business doing well.

Similarly, German CEOs do not have the astronomical executive pay that US CEOs have. They are much more down to earth.

Germany is a nation that has had social insurance since Bismarck, primarily to contain a vigorous and violent left wing movement during the Kulturkampf of the late 19th Century. German unions are often quite conservative with respect to the culture wars and are hostile to that movement, which has its base more in the universitites and eco-groups than in the heavily unionized shop floors and production lines.

Yet at the same time, Germany has had no minimum wage until 2015. The US had a minimum wage since 1938. This, too, is because historically German businesses adopted a much more cooperative relationship to workers.

So even though it's true that Germany has high rates of unionization and an innovative economy, that does not mean that unions in the US would lead to the same outcomes. German and US unions are different beasts.

European unions are completely different from US unions in how they act. UAW is the only car union in the US and recently had federal probes and they arrested like 15 people in the leadership (they were using union dues to buy ferraris, backyard pools, and other such things). They currently have a federal monitor making sure they reform.

UAW is the union trying to organize Tesla's plant.

I should also note that almost all Japanese auto companies in the US are non-union and it's been that way for many decades.

Suggesting a union is bad because it'd be good "for the benefit of a privileged few" is a bit ironic when the company is mamaged by a man who is in the running for the title of Richest Man in the World.

He’s only the near-richest man in theory. If he tried to convert all of his company ownership into cash, the company value would crash so fast that he would probably be lucky to actually recover one fifth of his theoretical wealth.

Seeing the current state of Detroit, you have a point that such practices may not have been sustainable.

Detroit did this to themselves. They failed to innovate and got beat by the Japanese on quality. That wasn’t the unions fault, but the union gets blamed.

The unions complaints were only that they were gonna get left holding the bag when things got bad while the c suite floated off with full pockets..and they were right.

Without looking at how Detroit failed you cannot deduce from the presence of unions that they were the cause.

What makes you so sure about that? Do you have any examples of how unionized workers produce less sustainable business then non-unionized workers? I don’t think Detroit is a good example as auto-workers in Europe still produce plenty growth for their business, while mostly belonging to a union.

GM has been unionized in some form or fashion for nearly a century.

And they were wildly profitable, and successful, one of the largest and most successful businesses in the entire world!

Toyota also has a large unionized workforce in many places!

They've also been wildly successful for many decades!

I'm really not getting this "wither and stagnate" argument.

Unless you mean if Tesla is unionized maybe in 60 years they will be disrupted by a new upstart firm.

Well...ok but that has nothing at all to do with unions.

If the plan was to create a new collective with a charter that was consistent with the long view of Tesla while protecting and advocating for labor then you’ve got a fair point.

It seemed to me they were just going to join the UAW.

There are two assembly plants within a few miles of where I grew up in the US. Both Japanese car companies, to this day they aren’t union and they are doing fine. There have been a few dustups from the UAW over the years, but they were never successful in flipping the workforce.

I think the threat of unionizing might help keep Tesla more invested in avoiding the type of environment that would foster broad support of organizing within the company.

Tesla doesn't owe them a job. They can make their own company, make it unionized, and make it popular.

Or Tesla’s workers can collectively decide for what’s best for themselves?

Or individually?

I have no problem with unions so long as membership is entirely voluntary for every employee. The problem I have is coercive collectivism.

Also, is there any evidence that collective action returns a sustainably larger slice of corporate revenues?

It's a commons problem; voluntary membership means free-riders will destroy the collective resource.

Except "my labor" is not a collective resource, so it's not really a tragedy of the commons situation.

Is that sufficient reason to coerce others to participate? Why should people who want to collectively bargain have a veto over the people who don’t want that?

Tesla’s CEO is the richest human on the planet and we’re worried about workers taking too much? If Elon’s stressing over sustainability, let him take the pay cut.

I may be confused, but your comment appears to be a bit of a non sequitur.

This comment seems really confused. It seems like you think Musk is “the richest human” in terms of liquid cash, and that that abundance of liquidity came from Tesla profits that could have been divvied up among the employees. Is that right?

He gets no salary already. He's paid only in stock.

Well, Tesla's CEO is just one of the workers of Tesla, too.

And Tesla should be allowed every opportunity to stop them.

I guess Tesla broke the law in this case, but I do not really agree with the ruling and the law. Musk should be allowed to present the possible downsides.

> And Tesla should be allowed every opportunity to stop them.

We've tried this. People died over it. We enacted laws to prevent it from happening, so that labor can stand on equal ground with capital.

Yeah, pretty sure shooting people is not what GC meant by "every opportunity".

>>We've tried this. People died over it. We enacted laws to prevent it from happening, so that labor can stand on equal ground with capital.

This is simply not true, except in the most pedantic and disingenuous sense.

There were violent strikes by some groups of unionized workers, that broke the law, and that resulted in some deaths, if that's what you're referring to. There is absolutely no reason this thuggery should have been rewarded by giving the strikers what they demanded, which was the abrogation of the company owners' private property and contracting rights.

As it happened, US industry, and with it US wages, grew much faster before society gave into the unions, when the US was still a free market where people had a sacred right to freely contract.

> allowed every opportunity

Unless you're also happy about shooting people starting a union or striking, you should read this article to learn why this is a really bad idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_th...

Compare and contrast https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/

didn't that happen when joining union was voluntary?

Sounds like you should crack a history book open.

Depending on your biases, you pick a book that'll confirm them.

The downside musk presented was a lie though: a union could absolutely bargain for stock options.

But Tesla could outright refuse under any circumstances to give stock options to unionized employees, no?

That's their prerogative.

Also FWIW Musk clarified that he was talking about the fact that no UAW employees have stock options at any other company.

Maybe he has no plans to offer stock because such incentives don't really work when your labor supply is captured by a monopoly.

I don’t understand this logic at all.

Just because one company is partially unionized that does not mean that all workers who wish to be part of a union try to work at that company. Maybe the working conditions changed (for the worse), or maybe the worker doesn’t want to move to another state just to work for a company that is unionized. Either way, it’s not like there’s a 1 company quota in every industry that can be unionized and then bam problem solved.

Glad to see the NRLB still has teeth. I was worried it basically fell to the wayside nowadays.

What do you mean in terms of falling to the wayside? It's a politically-appointed board, so you can expect things to change with each administration, but it's not like it did nothing during the Trump administration. This is a pretty good overview of the changes that happened and might be reversed over the next year:

https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/the-biden-era-of-labor-law...

The entire concept of unionization seems unnecessarily confrontational. It does not need to be this way. Corporations are creations of the state. There is nothing preventing the state to require significant representation of employees in every board of directors. This board representation could support management that better reflects employee participation, e.g. Sociocracy. In this way, labour and capital could work together in a more integrated manner, avoiding much of this unnecessary conflict. Or, at least moving the conflict to more granular level of problem solving where views can be grounded in real-world challenges.

The biggest confusion I have is everybody seems to approach Amazon and Tesla unionization as "hopefully it happens so workers will get better wages!"

I could be wrong but... I'm pretty sure Amazon and Tesla pay great relative to their space. Relatively demanding, sure. I get it. We've all seen the article where some Amazon worker urinated in a bottle because "the job is just so ruthless!". They employ hundreds of thousands of workers worldwide. If it was that bad, I think they'd have a harder time hiring.

I could have sworn I read that if you are a hardworking Amazon warehouse worker, they'll train you for a more technical job. That seems like a pretty good benefit. I'm sure most Amazon warehouse jobs start in the $15-20/hr range. How much better can you really get for what is essentially reading a screen, grabbing something off of a shelf, and putting it in a box? Maybe drive a forklift/unload a truck with a pallet jack.

I feel like the same people who want Amazon to unionize so workers can get better wages + healthcare, also don't want Amazon to kill mom + pop shops. Ok... How is a mom and pop shop supposed to pay $20/hr with healthcare for a warehouse worker when they don't have AWS money falling from the sky?

"Relatively demanding" is an understatement. It seems as though you're really downplaying how much this job sucks. The awful nature of the conditions are well known:

https://www.nelp.org/publication/amazons-disposable-workers-...

As for people hired, try upwards of 600,000 in front line roles, with high turnover. They keep hiring because many don't last over a year in the warehouses. People need cash, and the hiring process is incredibly frictionless.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazons-turnove...

Do these people not deserve better working conditions?

> I'm pretty sure Amazon and Tesla pay great relative to their space.

> I'm sure most Amazon warehouse jobs start in the $15-20/hr range. How much better can you really get for what is essentially reading a screen, grabbing something off of a shelf, and putting it in a box?

Amazon is also one of the richest companies in the world, largely dependant on the work of each and every one of those warehouse workers. Why is it ok for the company to try to squeeze every penny of profit, but not for employees to try to squeeze every possible penny of wage out of the company?

Amazon could probably make a great profit even if it paid its warehouse workers 30 or even 100 USD per hour. Why is it a priori wrong for employees to try to move the needle in that direction?

If that's unrealistic, still: Amazon's profit went up by 84% in 2020. Why shouldn't workers seek for their wages to go up 84% instead?

Not saying that they should, but there is a strange double standard in these sorts of discussions, where it is taken for granted that the company should seek to extract the maximum amount of profit from its workers, but the other way around is seen as abnormal.

I think the assumption is that mom and pop shops have a better baseline working environment, ex.

https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+warehouse+ambulance

"How much better" would be things like AC when the weather is too hot (which it seems has improved after all the negative press), and other safety considerations as mentioned in all the articles.

I'm not for or against unions here, but I'm certain Amazon could do better.

> The biggest confusion I have is everybody seems to approach Amazon and Tesla unionization as "hopefully it happens so workers will get better wages!"

That might be the thing you're wrong about. It sounds like most of the Amazon unionization efforts _aren't_ necessarily about better pay. It seems like more of the focus is about better, more humane working conditions.

If Amazon pays its workers slightly above average that's great, but if they treat those same workers like absolute shit with inhumane working conditions, then that's a problem that a union can help resolve.

I listened to a podcast recently about Amazon union drives and apparently the big gripe isn't wages but working conditions. The almost universal sentiment is that people are treated like robots. Breaks are so rare and short that pissing in bottles or defecating in bags is common. Sometimes people have to choose between relieving themselves and eating since the break is too short for both. Most of the people interviewed wanted more humane working conditions.

There are many worse places to work, but that's whataboutism and using that argument leads to a race to the bottom.

Warehouse work used to pay more than $15/hr, and if you look at the stats workers in counties without Amazon warehouses get paid more[1]. Pay is closer to 20 an hour.

[1] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/01/20/what-amaz...

- sorry for the second comment but I wanted to cut to the chase

It's probably (mostly) not about pay.

Unions can (and do!) negotiate working conditions.

Dunno about Tesla but based on everything I've read, Amazon's "blue collar" workforce appears to have productivity requirements that are mostly unobtainable without taking shortcuts (like skipping lunch and bathroom breaks) and these jobs appear to have an extremely high turnover rate, which speaks to the crap nature of the job.

A lot of people would not mind taking a small cut in pay for more humanitarian working conditions. People, generally, like being treated like people and not machines. But I don't actually think this is needed, I think Amazon can both improve working conditions and make a strong profit.

For a quick example, my cousin has a union job where a paid lunch break (half hour) was negotiated every day. Union leaders routinely make their rounds around the office to make sure everyone is actually taking their lunch break and not feeling forced to work through lunch.

Amazon is the company that knows its drivers are peeing in bottles to meet their quotas[1], but then tweets things like this in response[2]:

[1] https://theintercept.com/2021/03/25/amazon-drivers-pee-bottl...

[2] https://twitter.com/amazonnews/status/1374911222361956359

> If it was that bad, I think they'd have a harder time hiring.

You're severely underestimating the punishing conditions of an Amazon warehouse job.

A picker has a tablet that alerts them of an item to get. A clock starts counting down on the time you have to get to the right bin, find the item, and scan it. The warehouse sorting algorithms created by Amazon engineers optimize for retrieval time - but the warehouses are so huge, this means in practice that you have exactly as much time as you need assuming you never stop moving. For your entire 8-9 hour shift.

A typical amazon warehouse worker is essentially powerwalking non-stop for 8 hours straight on hard concrete floors. Breaks begin at a scheduled time, but your break begins when you sign out of your device, then you walk some distance to the break room (typically a 3-5 minute walk), AND you have to be signing back in to your device at the end of your break time. In practice this means your actual resting time on break is typically 5 minutes or less for 15's, 15-20 minutes for lunch. You are not allowed to sit or rest anywhere other than the break room.

If you sign back in only a few seconds late from your break, a manager will speak with you about it. If you sign back in 30 seconds late a few times in a row, you can be fired.

It's true that Amazon pays well in the warehouse space and is constantly hiring people with no experience. However, this isn't because Amazon is a great place to work - it's because there is an incredible amount of churn. People burn out of Amazon warehouse work constantly.

If you search on google for Amazon warehouse stories, you'll find a lot of people talking about how physically punishing the job is, about the constant stress from 22-year-old "managers" doing their rotation through a warehouse and enforcing Amazon's draconian rulebook without a thought in their head about the people they're taking to task for coming back from lunch 30 seconds late.

There's a blog out there from a guy who worked in Amazon warehouses in the Midwest, who documented everything while looking into trying to organize. The stories he tells about the work environment are hair-raising.

Amazon has figured out how to optimize the physical output of a human being, squeezing every last ounce of productivity from them every second of a shift until they either quit from burnout or get fired for not "making rate" (total % of lateness picking or packing assigned items). The fact that Amazon has an endless supply of people signing up to work in this environment says less about Amazon and more about the state of the American economy and how many desperate people are out there who need to sell their physical and mental health to Bezos pay their bills.

I don’t see why people expect existing US unions to improve the situation. They have entrenched political interests and represent many different industries. Once they’ve managed to get into an company, they’re repeatedly demonstrated they have no interest in listening to or advocating for the workers they represent.

I’m actually for having unions, but they should be limited in size, and it should be easy for workers at a given site, or with a particular job role to quit the union and form their own.

As it is, with an Amazon union, employees will have two abusive monopolies to fight instead of just one.

Counties with Amazon warehouses have a lower pay rate for warehouse work than counties without them.

Amazon makes bank because they can get away with exploiting workers more than a mom and pop shop can, or small businesses.

--- edit ---

Amazon also has an extremely high turn over rate revealing the cruelty of their workplaces: https://labor411.org/411-blog/warehouse-worker-turnover-rate...

Cite from economist for counties with lower pay: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/01/20/what-amaz... and chart without a paywall: https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1375127251004571649/pho...

Let's stop with the feel good "Amazon must pay better than alternatives because they're wealthy" and look at the facts.

This exists in Germany, it's called codetermination - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany#:~:....

It's not an alternative to a union, but an additional right. Workers can also form councils at shop floor level - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_council

I agree, if one wants to avoid the conflict of a union a work place should be at least 51% employee owned. Short of having mandatory employee ownership unions are the next best thing, and one is far easier in the US.

Otherwise we have what we have now, rampant unfairness and tension but no conflict because the board can get away with whatever conditions PR allows them to get away with.

There are so many issues with simply saying 'workers should own 51% of the company'. That statement and causes so many issues in every aspect of how companies are now run an financed, its hard to even imagine what such a regulation would mean or how it would work in practice.

> Short of having mandatory employee ownership unions are the next best thing, and one is far easier in the US.

Again, just saying this is easy but what is the meaning of union in this context? What a union is and what it does has been wildly different thought history, form country to country and form industry to industry.

What are the exact powers of that union mandatory union?

These discussions are always so abstract, union are almost an article of faith for some people.

Why 51%? Why not split labor ownership equally with capital?

I admire that you keep an open mind in a subject that is normally extremely infected, but I think your perspective shows a slight lack of understanding for the history of labor conflict around the world. I don't know if you'll find it helpful, but I'll just chime in on some of your points:

> The entire concept of unionization seems unnecessarily confrontational.

Unionization is confrontational by definition because it's the materialization of completely opposing interests. A unified workforce that can make collective demands on their employer is economically never in the interest of the employer.

> There is nothing preventing the state to require significant representation of employees in every board of directors.

There is not a single doubt in my mind that this would be seen by almost anyone as an extremely left-wing policy. When you say "there is nothing preventing the state" I'm not sure what you mean, unless you have a country with a very left leaning populace there is no way this would fly. For an example from my country, have a look at "employee funds".[1] The purpose was essentially to tax companies, use the money to buy stock in the companies, and give ownership to a part of the companies to trade unions. So, in a way, exactly what you mention. Remember that this was attempted in a country that had a post-war social democratic majority for decades, and even then it didn't work.

> In this way, labour and capital could work together in a more integrated manner, avoiding much of this unnecessary conflict.

Again, the conflict between labor and capital is not "unnecessary", it's built into the power relation. While everybody benefits from the company doing well in the long run during an equilibrium where everybody's happy, in the short term, changes to the benefit of the employer are often negative to the employees, and vice versa.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_funds

I'm not sure why you are currently downvoted; it seems like a contribution to this discourse.

Even so, perhaps the reasoning frame you promote is one of our challenges. I see labour and capital as being in conflict when they are out of balance with regard to one another.

In particular, I do not think labour (or capital) must always be in the driver's seat. I think that every situation probably has a healthy balance of power, dependent upon the circumstances, where both capital and labour are respected for the contributions they make to the enterprise.

Isn't the relationship between unions and corporations NECESSARILY confrontational?

A corporation would like to pay its employees as little as possible. The employees would like the opposite. What am I missing? - genuine question.

In Germany, for instance, companies are required to have union members on the board. From what I understand about the structure of unions there, it allows unions to advocate on behalf of employees while being less confrontational. It's ostensibly a more effective way for the two parties to collaborate effectively to everyone's benefit.

This sounds like "we don't need unions if we mandate unions". Many countries do this, and with success.

The actual only way that capital and workers can have a non-adversarial relationship is if the workers are in control of the capital. Otherwise capital will always be leverage used to extract surplus value from workers. That, on a large scale, is socialism by the way.

It automatically creates an adversarial relationship. Terrible way to live life on either side of that construct.

No one should be forced to work anywhere. Which also means working isn’t a right. Work somewhere that works with you and establish a healthy relationship. Set expectations and be clear on what is desired.

One spends much of their time working, to do it in such a way where a cordial relationship is not there; it might as well be no different than hell.

Find somewhere else to work if a company doesn’t work with your ethos. Unionizing to coerce and compel is so disgusting. It’s plainly a form of bullying. That’s no way to live life.

In many companies, you don't need a union to make it adversarial: it's already an adversarial relationship. It's a war with only one side shooting. The union just attempts to arm the other side. It would be great if leadership and employees were actually on the same side (rather than just in words), with things like employee representation on the board, and fair bargaining for wages with equal power on either side, but that's just not a reality at most jobs.

That’s easy to say, but which other auto plant in the Bay Area should workers go to work at? There aren’t any others.

Oh no, he has to delete a tweet! A two-year old tweet! The humanity!

This is ridiculous. Where's the fucking fine?

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

To understand the political evolution of Western democracies, it is instructive to read about the alliance between rent-seeking labor unions and the Democratic Party in the largest Western democracy, the US:

https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-trou...

It is also worth noting that virtually every major news company has a fully unionized workforce who essentially can't be replaced and have a financial conflict of interest in how the public perceives left vs right policies and parties.

To repeat the key info from this case that makes one question the NRLB ruling (from reddit originally):

The tweet is https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/998454539941367808

> Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union. Could do so tmrw if they wanted. But why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing? Our safety record is 2X better than when plant was UAW & everybody already gets healthcare.

where he is talking about the fact that other companies with the UAW do not have stock options for their employees , which he even clarifies in this next tweet https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/999415738967277568

> Exactly. UAW does not have individual stock ownership as part of the compensation at any other company.

This is apparently "intimidation". And as for the guy fired

> In another incident, a union-affiliated worker, Jose Moran, accessed Workday, Tesla's internal HR system, to look up information about an employee who opposed the union. Moran took a screenshot of the other worker's Workday page—which included his name, photo, job title, and other information—and texted it to another union-affiliated employee, Richard Ortiz. Ortiz wound up using the anti-union employee's picture in a post on a private Facebook group for pro-union Tesla employees.

> Richard Ortiz was fired after the incident , but because Tesla did not have standing rules against browsing employees' profiles on Workday or screenshotting them , apparently that's not allowed.

> why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing?

If you don't think that Elon means employees will lose their stock options if they unionize, then what does he mean?

I'm taking it to mean union employees wouldn't get new grants. Which makes sense to me - I have a hard time squaring how you can be in a union with an adversarial relationship to management, whilst at the same time being an owner of the company. It's one or the other.

The likelihood that the UAW would roll in, start collecting dues and then do nothing with the comp structure seems extremely small.

“It would be a real shame if something were to happen to those stock options once you unionized, wouldn’t it?”

Union contracts are employer specific (and in some cases, facility specific), and if the Tesla factory workers unionized, they could negotiate for stock grants.

The threat was that Tesla would revoke stock option grants if the workforce unionized, or refuse to negotiate over the availability of stock options, which is illegal under current federal labor regulations.

No, most other automakers don't offer stock, because the UAW didn't negotiate that with other automakers. However, for most other automakers, (and indeed, outside of tech generally) stock options are not worth much because the stock doesn't appreciate rapidly and it's not worth the administrative burden of issuing/tracking options for share gains in the fractions of a dollar. Most other automakers do allow employees to purchase (actual) shares of company stock out of pre-tax income, which is generally a huge benefit for companies that actually make money and are valued on fundamentals.

> Union contracts are employer specific (and in some cases, facility specific), and if the Tesla factory workers unionized, they could negotiate for stock grants.

This is true in the US, but it's not true in other countries which learned from our mistakes and implemented wage boards/sectoral bargaining, where a union contract applies to an entire industry at once. This makes the employer less likely to feel they're becoming uncompetitive by accepting the union, which is good since in the past they tended to react by having all their employees killed by the Pinkertons.

> Union contracts are employer specific (and in some cases, facility specific), and if the Tesla factory workers unionized, they could negotiate for stock grants

If it was my factory, I would cut the stock grant and fire them all - unionized or not - to end a clear message to the other factories: "you only have one job, while I have more than one factory"

> Richard Ortiz was fired after the incident , but because Tesla did not have standing rules against browsing employees' profiles on Workday or screenshotting them , apparently that's not allowed.

The real question is if they'd have been fired for doing that if they weren't a union organizer. And perhaps more importantly, whether you'd be able to convince a judge that looking up co-workers on an internal directory and/or posting about them privately on Facebook is always a firable offense.

I don't quite get that objection though, why do you need stated rules that a certain internal site is internal information? Everything is assumed to be internal information unless stated otherwise. That violates any HR policy anywhere. More so the guy was putting it on facebook to literally get people to stalk the guy. So I'm surprised he didn't get criminal charges.

I don't see how it isn't a firable offense given that it violates the confidentiality agreement that lists termination as a possible consequence of violation.

So it seems to me that what Oritz did must qualify as protected activity...

> To repeat the key info from this case that makes one question the NRLB ruling...

These issues (among others) are addressed at length in the NLRB's decision (https://apps.nlrb.gov/link/document.aspx/09031d45833d3fce) which takes into account probably thousands of pages of briefs, witness statements, and legal analysis.

The decision itself is only ~50 pages and is readable without a legal background. The section "credibility findings" which starts on page 32 might interest you.

The full docket activity page for the case is here (https://www.nlrb.gov/case/32-CA-197020).

Because of all of the above I disagree with the ruling. While yes Elon's tweet is borderline "intimidation", the guy was fired for very legitimate reasons, taking internal company information about employees and basically doxxing them on facebook. The NLRB shouldn't be defending doxxers.

He didn’t Dox them - he didn’t publish their home addresses or phone numbers, he merely said “these people testified on behalf of the company at a state hearing.” This is very clearly protected organizing activity, as documented with multiple case citations in the judge’s ruling.

In addition, the employee who was fired didn’t access the internal system. Someone else did, and texted him the photos, which he posted. The person who allegedly accessed the system only got a warning. So, if the concern is the improper access of company systems, then they punished the wrong guy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com