Elon Musk really likes bots — except, perhaps, when they’re cluttering Twitter. The also-CEO-of-Tesla likes them so much that he’s built “full self-driving” software that’s so unready for prime time, it just triggered the recall of 362,758 automobiles. (For the record, we love vehicle-assist safety technology keeping cars in their lane, avoiding collisions and so on, and we look forward to the time when true autopilot is a reality; that day, however, has not yet arrived.)
There’s pretty clear evidence that Musk prefers decision-making by computer code to the messiness of human negotiation. For years he’s made no bones about his contempt for organized labor. Now, a handful of Tesla employees in Buffalo have complained to the National Labor Relations Board that they were fired after announcing their intent to unionize. Tesla management says the claim is false, and that the terminations are the result of poor performance reviews. Just one of 27 people in the software group let go, it says, “officially identified as part of the union campaign.”
The NLRB will sort this out. And we understand a car company executive worrying about becoming a union shop. United Auto Workers’ contracts, with a heavy helping of management incompetence, were part of what pushed Detroit to the brink of bankruptcy, and union leadership has a history of corruption. That experience might well give some Tesla employees pause before jumping on the labor electric bus.
But whether or not unionizing is a good fit at a plant is beside the point. In America, employees have a right to band together and bargain collectively for better wages, benefits and working conditions. It is illegal for management to intimidate, retaliate against or terminate those who do so. When Amazon fired Christian Smalls, it created a righteous monster.
Musk and his executives don’t have to be happy that workers are scratching the union itch, but they can’t punish them for doing so. That’s American law — and unlike the auto industry, the energy industry and so many other things, it’s not ripe for disruption.