Tesla Fired Buffalo Workers Seeking to Organize, Union Says

Tesla fired at least 18 employees, including several leaders of a unionization campaign, a day after they announced plans to organize a Tesla plant in Buffalo, workers said in a filing to the National Labor Relations Board.

Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, has been blunt in his opposition to unions, and the company has a reputation for using hardball tactics against union organizers.

“I strongly feel this is in retaliation to the committee announcement, and it’s shameful,” Arian Berek, a member of the Buffalo organizing committee, said in a statement. Ms. Berek said she was fired after returning to work after a bout with Covid-19 and bereavement leave.

The Rochester branch of the Workers United union, in a “charge against employer” dated Wednesday, told the labor relations board that it sought an injunction to block the firings, which it called unlawful. Tesla “terminated these individuals in retaliation for union activity and to discourage union activity,” the filing said. The firings were reported earlier by Bloomberg News.

Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Jaz Brisack, an organizer with Workers United who has been involved in the campaign, said in an interview on Tuesday that workers had decided to go public with their organizing effort partly to make it easier for them to communicate with one another about those efforts.

She said that many workers had complained of being closely monitored at their computers and that being public would give them more freedom to have conversations about the union campaign. It is illegal for a company to fire workers for so-called protected concerted activity such as seeking to unionize.

The Buffalo factory makes solar panels and components for charging equipment, according to Tesla’s website, and has about 800 workers who help develop driver-assistance software.

The labor dispute appears likely to complicate Tesla’s relationship with President Biden, who on Wednesday praised the company’s decision to open up a portion of its charging network to owners of other electric vehicles.

The move seemed to represent an improvement in the relationship between Mr. Biden and Mr. Musk, who had complained that the administration paid insufficient attention to Tesla during its push for electric vehicle subsidies.

But Mr. Biden has also cast himself as a strong promoter of unions, and the president has been critical of companies that take what he considers to be anti-union actions. A White House spokeswoman said in a statement Thursday that “the president supports fundamental rights for workers under the National Labor Relations Act, including the right to organize free from intimidation and coercion.”

Companies run by Mr. Musk have responded to worker organizing in the past by firing the employees involved.

In 2021, the National Labor Relations Board found that Tesla had illegally fired a worker involved in organizing at the company’s car factory in Fremont, Calif., and that Mr. Musk had illegally threatened workers with the loss of stock options if they unionized.

The board ordered Tesla to reinstate the worker with back pay and ordered Mr. Musk to delete a Twitter post making the implied threat. The post appears to still be active.

Last year, SpaceX, the rocket manufacturer that Mr. Musk started, fired at least eight employees after they helped to write a letter to management urging the company to distance itself from Mr. Musk’s sometimes inflammatory statements on Twitter and to better enforce the company’s policies on sexual harassment and discrimination.

In that case, the employees deliberately avoided broaching the subject of unionization because, in addition to Mr. Musk’s reputation as anti-union, the company required managers to receive training on how to prevent union activity. The workers said they hoped that avoiding the subject would allow them to work constructively with executives to address their concerns. But the company nonetheless fired several of them shortly after the letter became public.

The employees filed unfair labor practice charges with the labor board in November; the cases are pending.

Enforcement of the law in this area is known to be slow and inefficient.

After employees file a charge, a regional office of the National Labor Relations Board must investigate, a process that often takes weeks or months. If the regional office finds merit in the accusation, it will give the company a chance to settle the charge and issue a complaint in the absence of a settlement. The complaint is then litigated before an administrative judge, whose ruling can be appealed to the labor board in Washington, then to federal court.

The process can take years, but the labor board can ask a federal judge to issue an injunction reinstating the workers as the case runs its course. While the board has sometimes been reluctant to use this approach, Jennifer Abruzzo, the agency’s general counsel, issued a memo last year instructing regional offices to make it a more common practice. The agency has won reinstatement for several workers since then, although the injunction process can itself take months.