Via The Intelligencer: More Tesla Workers Want To Unionize, Despite Elon Musk’s Promises Of Free Frozen Yogurt
(BUFFALO, NEW YORK) - Workers at Tesla’s Solar City Plant in Buffalo are attempting to Unionize in order to demand better compensation and improved workplace conditions.
The United Steelworkers (USW) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) are leading a joint drive to organize different job descriptions - production and manufacturing - within the factory that received $750 million in New York State funding.
“They can improve on demands from the Workers that are much needed in the workplace,” said Tesla Worker Pete Farrell told WIVB-TV/Channel 4 in Buffalo, going on to cite “fairness, job security, higher wages” as reasons to organize.
However, Tesla’s Twitter-happy founder and CEO, Elon Musk, has yet to weigh in on the matter, but soon he may have to.
Buffalo’s Solar City Plant isn’t the only Tesla facility to try to Unionize.
When Workers at Tesla’s Fremont, California Car Plant announced their intention to organize with the United Auto Workers (UAW) in 2017, BuzzFeed News reported that Musk accused one Worker of being a “Union plant” in an e-mail to staff, and promised to build “a Tesla electric pod car roller coaster” and free frozen-yogurt machines.
This did not dissuade Tesla Workers from organizing, in Fremont or elsewhere.
In fact, if conditions inside the Buffalo facility resemble those at Tesla’s other factories, the USW/IBEW Organizing Drive looks inevitable.
A Wired report, published this week, depicts a mercurial Musk - who regularly berates Employees at his Nevada Gigafactory, seemingly with no check on his power.
“Sometimes Musk would terminate people, other times he would simply intimidate them. One manager had a name for these outbursts – ‘Elon’s rage firings’ - and had forbidden subordinates from walking too close to Musk’s desk at the Gigafactory out of concern that a chance encounter, an unexpected question answered incorrectly, might endanger a career,” Wired wrote.
Several months ago, a lengthy Business Insider report on the Nevada factory described it as a crowded, chaotic place that overworked Employees.
“People quit within the first two hours, people quit after a week. There was one guy who was fresh out of high school, eighteen years old, never had a job before and was excited to work: ‘I want to work seven days a week, 12 hours a day!’ But by about the fifth day, he was on the floor crying,” Jonathan Galescu, a Welder, told Insider.
Galescu is trying to organize a Union at Tesla, and he, like his would-be comrades in Buffalo and Fremont, face stiff opposition from the company’s management.
Though Tesla has said Employees are free to Unionize as they choose, Workers themselves have repeatedly complained of Anti-Union coercion and intimidation from management.
One former Worker, Dezzimond Vaughn, told The Guardian in September that he believes he was terminated for holding Union meetings at his home.
The Guardian verified Vaughn’s record of superlative work performance - and verified, too, that his reviews suddenly took a downward turn after management learned that he’d begun to organize.
Other California Workers said they were discouraged from wearing Union shirts and that management shut down workplace conversations about organizing.
Though Tesla has taken some steps to reduce injuries, a Reveal investigation found in April that Tesla had omitted some workplace injuries from its official reports, which made the company’s factories look safer than they actually were.
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