Tesla workers at a plant in Buffalo, New York, handed out Valentine’s Day themed leaflets on Tuesday, that read “Roses are red/ Violets are blue/ Forming a union starts with you.” The cards were part of the workers’ now public efforts to start a union within Tesla, a company that has been aggressively opposed to their formation.
Efforts to unionize were started by employees who label data for Tesla’s Autopilot technology at its plant in Buffalo. The leaflets were part of the organizers’ efforts to recruit the roughly 1,000 manufacturing employees who work at the plant, reports Bloomberg.
The plant makes solar panels and components for charging equipment, but it was among the roughly 800 employees working as Autopilot analysts, in non-engineering roles, who were the most vocal about their reasons for unionizing.
Read: Tesla Allegedly Broke Labor Laws By Not Allowing Employees To Discuss Wages
Employees say that, in addition to fighting for pay that is more in line with similar jobs at other companies, they are fighting for a reduction in production pressures that they say are harmful to their health and lead some employees to skip bathroom breaks.
“People are tired of being treated like robots,” Al Celli, a member of the union’s organizing committee, told Bloomberg. “We have such a rush to get things done that I don’t know if it’s actually being well thought out. It’s just, ‘Let’s get this out as fast as we can.'”
The organizers, though, are likely to face stern pushback. The company’s CEO, Elon Musk, has openly opposed unionization and in 2021, the National Labor Relations Board found that tesla had illegally fired a worker for their union activities, and that Musk had illegally threatened to take away workers stock options if they unionized.
For this effort, the workers aren’t turning to the United Auto Workers union, though, which represents Ford, GM, and Stellantis workers in the United States. Instead, they have turned to the Service Employees International Union affiliate Workers United, which helped Starbucks employees unionize recently.
This is “another example of workers showing that there is no such thing as an unorganizable workplace,” said Jaz Brisack, the architect of the coffee shop workers’ unionizing effort. “The narrative on unions has shifted thanks to Starbucks and other companies doing it first.”
