By Following Trump’s interview with Elon Musk, The United Auto Workers union on Tuesday filed federal labor charges against former President Donald Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. In what can only be described as a political attempt at more lawfare launched by a desperate union president, the charge accuses them of attempting to intimidate workers who go on strike.
The accusations stem from remarks made during an interview on Twitter Monday night, where Trump and Musk discussed Musk’s potential role in Trump’s administration should he be reelected.
During the interview, Trump praised Musk, referring to him as “the cutter,” applauding Musk’s work in firing 80 percent of employees at Twitter after taking the website over.
CNN reported at the time that “Musk has laid off more than 6,000 people at Twitter since taking over the company, he told the BBC in a rare interview late Tuesday.
Musk was quoted as saying in the interview that the social media platform now has only 1,500 employees, down from under 8,000 who were employed at the time.”
Elon Musk said that after buying Twitter he realized there were “a lot of people doing things that didn’t seem to have a lot of value.”
“I think that’s true probably at most Silicon Valley companies, maybe not to the degree to which it was at Twitter,” Musk said while speaking virtually at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit in London on Tuesday.
“Twitter was in a situation where you’d have a meeting of 10 people and one person with an accelerator and nine with a set of brakes, so you didn’t go very far,” he continued.
In Silicon Valley, many investors have become worried about a rising “fake work” trend, Business Insider noted, “with some executives and investors saying that tech companies overhired and gave people unnecessary jobs as a ‘vanity metric.’ Proponents of the theory said this was why tech giants were slashing so many jobs.”
The UAW, according to The Hill, said that it filed federal labor charges alleging former President Trump and Elon Musk attempted to “intimidate and threaten” workers during their Monday evening interview on the social platform X.
“I mean, I look at what you do,” Trump told Musk. “You walk in, you say, ‘You want to quit?’ They go on strike, I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike, and you say, ‘That’s OK, you’re all gone. You’re all gone. So, every one of you is gone.’”
Federal law protects workers who go on strike from being fired, and it is illegal to threaten to do so, the UAW argued.
“When we say Donald Trump is a scab, this is what we mean. When we say Trump stands against everything our union stands for, this is what we mean,” UAW President Shawn Fain said.
Fain and Trump have long sparred over politics, with Fain—a far left Democrat—doing everything he can to keep the former president from winning over rank-and-file union members.
UAW President Shawn Fain said, “When we say Donald Trump is a scab, this is what we mean. Both Trump and Musk want working-class people to sit down and shut up, and they laugh about it openly. It’s disgusting, illegal, and totally predictable from these two clowns.”
The UAW, which has recently endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for the presidency, has been increasingly vocal against anti-union efforts. Fain previously praised President Joe Biden for joining a UAW picket line last year when the union went on strike against General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis.
The 2023 strikes, for which Fain received accolades, have come back to hurt autoworkers, just as Trump predicted when he told union members they should fire Fain. On Friday, Stellantis announced a cost-cutting plan that includes laying off 2,450 workers later this year at a Dodge Ram plant near Detroit.
“Stellantis’s chief executive, Carlos Tavares, has said the company needs to cut costs, and he has noted that at least one North American factory was operating at an unsatisfactory level.
The company has been hit by sluggish sales in North America, where it generates most of its profits, as well as bloated costs and manufacturing inefficiencies. It reported last month that profits in the first six months of 2024 fell by nearly half to 5.6 billion euros (about $6 billion)
The United Automobile Workers union had no immediate comment on the Stellantis announcement,” wrote The New York Times.
Fain himself is currently facing multiple corruption investigations. An independent monitor overseeing his union has alleged “that he ordered a vice president to take actions that would benefit his fiancée and her sister, among other reasons, according to a recent court filing.
The motion, filed by monitor Neil Barofsky, requests that the court confirm the monitor’s authority to receive access to records immediately and compel the UAW to produce documents that the monitor is asking for.
‘Despite the monitor’s repeated requests, the union has not provided such access to union documents for these investigations, insisting that the union must engage in what has become a lengthy pre-production review and asserting that it will withhold or redact documents as it deems necessary to protect privilege and confidentiality … by taking that position, the union has effectively stalled the monitor’s work,’ the motion said, which was filed in the U.S. District Court in Detroit Monday.”
Fain has also been accused of abuse of power, removing an employee who allegedly blocked the union boss’s attempt to spend money in a corrupt way.
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