United Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain has responded to recent comments made by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, elaborating on his opposition to unionization efforts. The union president pointed to rising wealth inequality as one of the major battles organizations like his are fighting against.
While Musk’s more profane provocations against X’s former advertisers caught more of the headlines at the New York Times Dealbook Summit 2023, he also explained that he doesn’t like unions because they create division.
“I think it’s generally not good to have an adversarial relationship between people on the line — one group at the company and another group,” said Musk. “In fact, I disagree with unions, perhaps for a reason that is different than people may expect. I just don’t like anything which creates kind of a lords and peasants sort of thing.”
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The CEO, who is the world’s wealthiest person, claimed that he worked on the line, slept in the factory, and therefore understands the workers at the plant. However, there are many reasons to be concerned about the way Tesla treats its workers. On top of illegally retaliating against employees who tried to unionize, the company is facing a number of lawsuits for the way its female and Black employees are treated.
Musk supports that Tesla had previously considered holding a unionization vote, but that a company cannot call one. There is nothing preventing a company from voluntarily recognizing a union, though. For his part, Fain appeared to find these arguments unconvincing.
Workers scrape by, Musk flies “his ass to outer space”
“The irony is, he talks about lords and peasants, and that’s the current status,” the union president said in a recent Instagram video. “While he’s getting extremely wealthy off the backs of his workers, and, you know, building rocket ships to fly his ass to outer space, workers continue to scrape to get by.”
Fain added that the UAW is concerned about much more than just Tesla. He pointed to 10 automakers operating in the U.S., which he claimed generated $12 trillion in revenue and $1 trillion in profits over the last decade. He called their relationship to their workers “out of whack,” and described wealth disparity a “crisis.”
Although the union has said that it believes Tesla’s workers can be unionized, it is also working to attract people in other automakers’ plants, and has found some success at VW. The UAW announced yesterday that 1,000 workers at the German automaker’s plant had signed union cards. That amounts to more than 30 percent of the plant’s workforce. Reuters reports that once 70 percent of workers say they want to join, it will demand a union representation vote.
“It boils down to one issue: working people want their lives back,” said Fain. “Workers are fed up with scraping by paycheck to paycheck while wealthy people, like the Musks of the world, keep taking more and more at the expense of millions of workers.”