An official from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has ruled that the managers at a Tesla service center in Florida broke U.S. labor laws by telling employees not to discuss their pay nor their working conditions.
According to the ruling, the trouble started in 2021, when some employees who had been working at the service discovered that new hires were being paid more than them, and brought their complaints to management, reports Reuters.
One technician even contacted a Tesla vice president, who forwarded the email to the head of its human resources department. Despite that, the supervisors at the service center held a meeting in which they instructed 25 employees not to discuss their pay or their working conditions. They also told the employees not to file complaints with higher level managers, according to Michael Rosas, the NLRB administrative law judge who presided over this case.
Read: Tesla Fired Workers After They Announced Plans To Unionize, Employees Claim
Weeks later, the technician who filed a complaint with the higher-ups was fired, prompting them to file a complaint against Tesla with the NLRB. In February, a hearing was held, in which Tesla argued that it had posted a notice in the service center notifying employees that workers could discuss their pay.
Despite that, the judge ruled that Tesla had violated its workers’ fundamental rights under U.S. labor law by attempting to silence employees, and prevent them from banding together.
The automaker’s record with workers rights is anything but solid. About a month ago, a U.S. appeals court upheld a separate NLRB ruling that the company’s CEO, Elon Musk, had broken labor laws by tweeting that employees could lose stock options if they joined a union.
In February, the Workers United union claimed that Tesla fired dozens of employees in Buffalo just days after they announced plans to attempt to form a union. In addition, Tesla is at the center of several race and gender-based lawsuits over its treatment of harassment between workers.
Despite being ruled against in this most recent case in Florida, Tesla is unlikely to feel much of a sting. Judge Rosas has ordered the automaker to cease and desist from violating the rights of its workers and to post a notice of its most recent violation in the service center. It will also have to email the notice to its employees.
