Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s rambling Twitter Spaces interview Monday night is making more news, as the United Auto Workers union has now filed federal labor charges against both of them for saying striking workers should be fired.
The biggest news to come out of Monday night’s livestreamed Twitter/X Spaces interview between Elon Musk and Donald Trump was that it started 40 minutes late because of technical screw-ups. But it did start eventually, and the two of them ended up yammering for about two hours, mostly just agreeing with each other about everything. And they both agreed that they do not care for labor unions or workers’ rights.
Yet a brief exchange on that topic prompted the United Auto Workers union (UAW) to file federal labor charges against both Trump and Musk with the National Labor Relations Board on Tuesday, according to CNN. The union argues that Trump's and Musk's remarks were a violation of federal law when Trump said that workers who threaten to go on strike should be fired.
To whatever degree Trump’s words make any narrative sense, the offending words from Trump are as follows:
“I look at what you do, you walk in and you just 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 okay, you’re all gone. You’re all gone. Every one of you is gone.”
Trump is likely referring to Musk laying people off at Twitter, and Musk laughed at Trump’s words and agreed by saying “Yeah.” But regardless, it is illegal under federal law to fire workers for threatening to strike.
“Donald Trump will always side against workers standing up for themselves, and he will always side with billionaires like Elon Musk, who is contributing $45 million a month to a Super PAC to get him elected,” UAW president Shawn Fain said in a press release announcing they’d filed charges. “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.”
As CNN points out, Musk’s car company Tesla is the largest non-union auto manufacturer in the US. And the UAW has already endorsed Kamala Harris for president.
But CNBC reminds us that the nation’s other major union, the Teamsters, has not made an endorsement yet. Teamsters president Sean O’Brien was even given a speaking slot at last month’s Republican National Convention, though he did not endorse Trump, and these remarks seem to make it less likely that he will.
“Firing workers for organizing, striking, and exercising their rights as Americans is economic terrorism,” O’Brien said in a Tuesday statement to CNBC.
CNN notes that probably nothing will come of these federal labor charges, which are more of a complaint, and not an actual lawsuit. The National Labor Relations Board might open an investigation, but there would be no financial or legal penalties. Trump and Musk could theoretically be ordered by a judge to simply stop saying things like this, and order them to rehire any employees fired for threatening to unionize. Since no employees actually lost their jobs over this exchange, that would seem irrelevant.
But if these remarks end up costing Trump the endorsement of the Teamsters, well, that would be at least a political consequence of this for Trump.
Related: Elon Musk’s Twitter/X Sues Advertisers for Not Advertising on Elon Musk’s Twitter/X [SFist]
Image: (Left) WhiteHouse.gov, (Right) U.S. Air Force / Trevor Cokley, both via Wikimedia Commons
