According to complaints filed earlier in December with the National Labor Relations Board, two Tesla employees claim they were fired illegally for complaining about company policies.
According to filings, workers claimed they were let loose to discuss their working conditions. This included Tesla’s failure “to enforce its non-harassment policies and its implementations of its post-COVID returns to office policy,” the filings state.
According to their lawyers, the employees were part of a group that drafted letters for Tesla’s executive team. Lawyers said they were fired after the letters were circulated but only after the discussions were done in internal chat groups.
One letter requested that the company change its strict return-to-office policy, which was announced in May and required that all Tesla employees work at least 40 hours per week from an office.
Musk said that he was not in favor of the plan and suggested that people pretend to be working elsewhere. One attorney stated that Musk’s tweets were “s*xualized” and “gendered, ” violating Tesla’s anti-harassment policy. A month after receiving a performance-based increase, one employee was fired.
According to a filing, the other employee was told that organizing employee talks was an “attack” against Tesla. Before, Tesla was in hot water over labor issues. The NLRB found Tesla had broken the law in 2021 when it fired a union activist. The NLRB ordered Musk to remove a tweet it claimed was a threat to labor organizers.
The board in august found that Musk violated workers’ rights by preventing them from wearing union shirts on the job.
A group of SpaceX employees filed a complaint in November, claiming they were fired for writing an open letter criticizing Musk’s conduct. Musk founded the rocket company and ran it. The same attorneys at Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein LLP represent both employees.
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