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That doesn't allow the employer to illegally fire someone in retaliation for unionizing. See the several people Amazon was forced to rehire and pay legal fees to in New York over the last few years.

New York State law does not supersede the federal National Labor Relations Act, which protects the rights of workers to establish a union from interference or coercion by an employer.

Firing people for trying to form a union is federally illegal under the NLRA.

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Very first sentence:

>Earlier this week, it was reported that Tesla workers in the company's Buffalo, New York Autopilot facility had sent a letter to CEO Elon Musk stating their attention to unionize.

Some bot (or semi-educated imbecile) no doubt meant to write 'intention to unionize'.

Seriously, can't they even write the salient element of the very first sentence of an article(!) correctly?

English is my third language, and even I caught this.

Tesla short sellers, former twitter censors, etc., seem to be scraping the bottom of the barrel in coordinating their anti-Elon-Musk campaigns.

Sounds like a shit state. In Australia we have rights and arnt slaves like that.

Is this during Tesla’s layoffs, or a specific event targeting union activity?

Maybe they told Elon why his tweets aren't getting attention?

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https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/discriminating-against-employees-because-of-their-union

All anti-Musk campaigns are now coordinated by Elon Musk himself. Further assistance is largely unnecessary.

Allegedly these guys were labelers for autopilot. A position that was always going to be eliminated as the company moved towards machine learning for labeling. Sounds like this group had nothing to lose and now they get to say it's because of their union organization plans instead of planned obsolescence.

They made the union announcement yesterday. They were fired today. Hmm 🤔

Who has alleged this? Seems like a very convenient story given just how many blatant retaliations to unions there have been in the last few years from multiple companies.

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Unfortunately, the manual labeling team is slowly shrinking anyway in favor of auto labeling. This will give them less leverage as Tesla needs them less and less.

Ask GM how unions are working out. Some good, some not so good.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/15/tesla_autopilot_workers_are_launching/

Here's the article referring to them as autopilot labelers wanting to unionize for job security because their boss has been vocal about not wanting humans to do the job.

Doesn’t this just mean there was retaliation for unionizing? Even if this is true, it sounds like they were fighting for their jobs against machines and were punished for doing so, which is technically illegal.

Almost no chance a bot wrote that—bots don’t make phonetic mistakes like that. It happens when you mentally sound out the word, and then when you go to write it down your brain glitches and writes a similar-sounding word instead.

Tesla always planned for the human labeling to exist only until it wasn't needed anymore, because at some point you will have done enough labeling and the supercomputers can take it from there. They already announced cuts in labeling last year. These people already knew their jobs had an end date not too far out. It sounds like they may have started unionizing just to put a legal wrench into the plans. I'm okay with unions, but this sounds like an abuse of union laws.

Isn’t protecting your human jobs against robotic replacements kind of a known reason for unionization by now though? As much as I like the growth of robotics and AI, I can acknowledge the issue it presents in a world that still requires a job to live. Unless these people are given UBI or helped into new positions by the company, it doesn’t seem abusive at all that they would try to unionize to save their livelihoods.

That's the interesting nature of this. The employees knew that their job had an end date. That's what prompted the whole push to be union. That's well documented in their rationale. So now they have to prove that it was retaliation for their efforts to unionize, and not just the end of necessity of their job. It'll be interesting to see how this will shake out at the NLRB because I think we're gonna see this a lot more in other industries soon.

Unless they were fired because their job requirements aren’t needed any more. The article said “several of the employees” who were terminated were participating in unionizing discussions, this would imply others who were fired weren’t. This implies it’s not retaliation or intimidation, but downsizing of a department that is no longer necessary for Tesla’s business model.

It’s like all these persnickety grammarians commenting on this story across Reddit today have a very obvious pro-Elon bias. Kind of weird.

It's illegal in the United States to fire someone for union organizing. It's called retaliation and it's a serious violation of labor laws.

I agree. It’s proving it that’s not easy, especially if a team is becoming less needed and shrinking anyway.

Starbucks tried the same thing in the same town. It didn't work then and it won't work now.

They fired them the day after lol

The timing is evidence, but not proof on its own in front of a judge. We know Tesla was already shrinking this team(look at last layoffs). Tesla claims the next round of layoffs was happening and these employees decided to call for a union right before the layoffs to stop the layoffs. Don’t fall for clickbait news headlines. Tesla could be full of bs too. But always two sides. See their response below.

https://www.tesla.com/blog/in-response-false-allegations

You could say union employees keep getting fired for low performance. You could also say it’s only low Performance employees that keep using the union card to keep their jobs.

Do you work for Tesla?

There will be unions in Tesla. There are other teams organizing that haven't spoken out yet and their teams are extremely important. ;) So yeah, Tesla's non union days are numbered.

That might apply to a McDonald's worker, but not here. They only had jobs in the first place because of AI. It's abusive because they knew their jobs were temporary, and they're using a unionization attempt to artificially extend them.

Putting them in other jobs would be a good idea, but these are pretty low-talent jobs. Look at an image on a computer, tell the computer what it is, next image. Google has been using us to tag images through captchas for years.

Great. If they are quite, then they are serious.

Unlike this group that’s using it as a card.

Surely a business would not lie!

Surely employees in obsolete jobs wouldn’t create frivolous lawsuits. A company shouldn’t retain employees in a department that is no longer a part of their business model. It really sucks for impacted employees, I get that, I really do, but to do otherwise could drag down the employment of everyone else in the company

Yeah they often tell employees they’re going to be laid off a day before they actually do it. I have some seaside property to sell you in Kansas