The United Auto Workers Tuesday filed an unfair labor practices complaint against former President Trump and Elon Musk after the pair joked about firing workers en masse in their widely hyped chat on social media.
The sprawling union said the Republican presidential nominee and the Tesla boss during their rambling and glitch-plagued discussion violated federal laws that prohibit employers from threatening to fire workers who go on strike.
“Both Trump and Musk want working class people to sit down and shut up, and they laugh about it openly,” UAW President Shawn Fain said in a statement.. “It’s disgusting, illegal, and totally predictable from these two clowns.”
Musk hit back by comparing Fain to two UAW predecessors who were accused of corruption, without offering any evidence.
“It looks like this guy will join them!” Musk tweeted.
The chit-chat about firing workers came up midway through Trump’s two-hour discussion with Musk, which was delayed by about 40 minutes by technical difficulties.
Despite the tech snafu, Musk trumpeted the event as a huge success, claiming that up to 1 billion people watched some portion of it worldwide.
Without prompting, Trump praised Musk for what he framed as a no-nonsense attitude towards workers who threaten to go out on strike,
“I look at what you do: You walk in and you just say, ‘You want to quit?’” Trump said. “They go on strike, and you say, ‘That’s okay, you’re all gone. You’re all gone. Every one of you is gone.’”
Musk laughed at Trump’s remarks and simply said, “yeah.”
It wasn’t immediately clear whether Trump was talking about any specific incident involving Musk’s companies.
Musk made deep cuts to Twitter when he took over the company, which is now called X, warning employees that they should leave unless they wanted to adapt to an “extremely hardcore” workplace. But those threats were aimed at white collar tech workers and were not unionized.
His Tesla electric vehicle company has fiercely battled organizing efforts by the UAW and other unions at several U.S. manufacturing plants. Space X, another Musk company, has also fought unionization.
The National Labor Relations Board will now investigate the UAW complaints. It could impose fines, although any enforcement action would likely take months to play out.
The UAW, which represents nearly 400,000 American workers, recently endorsed Harris for president and Fain last week ripped Trump at a rally in union-heavy Detroit, saying the ex-president “doesn’t know s–t about the auto industry.”
“Trump’s entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himself — self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a livestream in the year 2024,” said Joseph Costello, a Harris campaign spokesman.
The union-busting remarks appeared to be an unforced error by Trump. Despite the UAW endorsement of Harris, Republicans boast of making unprecedented inroads during the Trump era with union members, a historically strongly Democratic voting bloc.
The Teamsters Union has yet to make an endorsement and the union’s leader took the unprecedented step of addressing the Republican National Convention last month.
