Elon Musk continued his months-long effort to get U.S. President Joe Biden to credit Tesla Inc. for its EV leadership by sending a message to the UAW.
The Tesla CEO tweeted Thursday that the UAW was welcome to hold a vote at the company’s San Francisco Bay area factory. The company “will do nothing to stop them,” Musk said of the union.
There was no immediate comment from a UAW spokesman.
Musk isn’t so much offering a concession to the UAW as he is trying to make a point. U.S. labor law encourages collective bargaining and protects private-sector employees from being retaliated against for organizing. But the world’s richest man is betting a vote held by the union — a key ally of Biden’s — would fail because of how Tesla treats and compensates its workers.
Biden has repeatedly left Tesla off the the guest lists and out of the prepared remarks he’s made promoting America’s EV industry. He’s instead praised General Motors and Ford Motor Co., which make and sell fewer EVs but employ tens of thousands of UAW workers. Bloomberg News reported last month that the president’s antipathy toward Tesla mainly has to do with Musk’s hostility toward unions.
The National Labor Relations Board ruled last year that Tesla had repeatedly violated U.S. labor law, including by firing a union activist, and needed to make Musk delete a May 2018 tweet that suggested workers would give up company-paid stock if they chose to unionize. Tesla appealed and has argued Musk’s tweet was protected by the First Amendment.
The UAW has been trying to organize the Fremont plant for several years and so far has had little success. The plant had been unionized under its former owners — a joint venture between Toyota Motor Corp. and GM.
Musk tweeted that Tesla’s biggest challenge in the Bay area is fierce competition for workers. He also wrote that Tesla’s compensation is the highest in the auto industry, citing a Reddit post.
Musk was responding to a tweet by Gene Simmons, the co-lead singer of rock band Kiss, who criticized Biden for not mentioning Tesla during his State of the Union speech Tuesday.
“Give Elon Musk/Tesla its due,” Simmons wrote. “They are game changers and should be heralded.”