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national labor relations act
UAW Hits Trump, Musk With Federal Labor Charges Over Effort to 'Intimidate Workers'
"When we say Donald Trump is a scab, this is what we mean," said United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain.
Aug 13, 2024
The United Auto Workers announced Tuesday that it filed federal labor charges against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk after the former president heaped praise on the world's richest man for firing striking workers.
During a rambling and lie-filled conversation on X—the social media platform owned by Musk—Trump hailed the Tesla CEO as "the greatest cutter."
"I mean, I look at what you do. You walk in, 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," Trump said as Musk—who is backing the GOP nominee—laughed. "And you say: 'That's okay, you're all gone.'"
The UAW argued Tuesday that Trump and Musk's remarks during the conversation, which was viewed live by more than a million people, amounted to "illegal attempts to threaten and intimidate workers who stand up for themselves by engaging in protected concerted activity, such as strikes."
"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."
"Under federal law, workers cannot be fired for going on strike, and threatening to do so is illegal under the National Labor Relations Act," the union said.
Listen to Trump's comments:
Trump praises billionaire Elon Musk for firing workers who were striking for better pay and working conditions pic.twitter.com/4ZGWHV49Mw
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) August 13, 2024
Shawn Fain, the UAW's president, said in a statement Tuesday that "when we say Donald Trump is a scab, this is what we mean."
"When we say Trump stands against everything our union stands for, this is what we mean," Fain added. "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. 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."
Shortly after taking over the social media platform formerly known as Twitter in 2022, Musk terminated unionized custodial workers at the company's San Francisco headquarters on the same day that they launched an Unfair Labor Practice strike. Months later, Musk-led Tesla fired dozens of workers at its Buffalo, New York factory just a day after they announced plans to unionize.
Musk, like Trump, has a long history of hostility toward labor unions, both in the U.S. and overseas—a similarity that the pair bonded over during the X conversation Monday night.
"Scab recognize scab," the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the U.S., wrote on X in response to Trump's remarks on striking workers.
Chris Brooks, a strategist for Fain, added that "when the mighty UAW says DONALD TRUMP IS A SCAB, this is exactly what we mean."
"Listen to Trump in his own words, laughing with anti-union billionaire Elon Musk about how they both support firing workers who exercise their right to strike," Brooks added.
Both the AFL-CIO and the UAW have endorsed Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, warning that a second Trump term would "would decimate workers' ability to organize; gut health and safety protections; attack civil, labor, and consumer rights; eviscerate retirement security; and undermine our ability to hold the wealthy and corporations accountable."
Warren Gunnels, staff director for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), wrote during the Trump-Musk conversation that "the problem is not the dude from Guatemala picking tomatoes for starvation wages," rejecting the pair's demonization of immigrants.
"The problem is billionaires like Trump and Musk who exploit workers, rip off the American people, and make a fortune by being conmen," Gunnels added. "The problem is corporate greed, boss. Trump and Musk are scabs."
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Bezos and Musk Wage Retrograde War on Unions
The modern-day robber barons want the Supreme Court to return America to a time before workers had the right to form unions.
Feb 27, 2024
I never believed Jeff Bezos, the second-richest person in America (worth an estimated $114 billion), and Elon Musk, the richest (at $180 billion), would brazenly use their wealth and power to try to eliminate labor unions and thereby suppress the wages of American workers even further.
In my naivete, I assumed they wouldn’t reveal themselves as no better (and in many ways worse) than the robber barons of the first Gilded Age, whose riches were unrivaled and who fought with all their might against labor unions.
It’s not that Bezos’ Amazon has exactly hidden its objective. The company has fought off every attempt to organize its workers—holding anti-union meetings, targeting union supporters, challenging union elections, and firing workers who tried to organize.
But in a legal filing last Thursday, Amazon went even further. It argued that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which supervises and enforces labor law, is unconstitutional because it mixes judicial and executive functions.
Evidently, it’s not enough for Bezos and Musk to amass more wealth than any two people on the planet.
Jeff Bezos’s view (I’m assuming Amazon’s filing reflects his view) is the same as that of retrograde Elon Musk, whose SpaceX made an almost identical argument in a lawsuit last month.
The NLRB is the agency that enforces the National Labor Relations Act—the 1935 Act that legitimized labor unions.
Bezos and Musk’s argument was rejected by the Supreme Court 86 years ago in NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp.
In that case, the NLRB found that the giant steel corporation Jones & Laughlin had violated the National Labor Relations Act by firing workers for trying to organize a union. The board ordered the corporation to reinstate them, pay them back wages, and refrain from any further actions to discourage workers from exercising their rights under the act.
In an opinion by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, the Supreme Court upheld the NLRB’s order, holding that Congress acted within its constitutional authority to pass the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, including the National Labor Relations Board to enforce it.
But modern-day robber barons Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk want the Supreme Court to reverse its 1937 ruling and return America to a time before workers had the right to form unions.
Both of these tycoons hate unions. Both have illegally fired workers for trying to organize them. Bezos’s Amazon—having had one of its warehouses vote to unionize—is actively patrolling its workplaces against any signs of unionizing activity. Musk’s Tesla is the target of organizing efforts by the UAW and a number of European unions.
Evidently, it’s not enough for Bezos and Musk to amass more wealth than any two people on the planet. Not enough for them to monopolize their respective industries (Amazon is now being sued by the Federal Trade Commission, Musk’s SpaceX and his X platform are also monopolies). Not enough for them to fight their workers who want better pay and safer working conditions. Not enough for them to wage a war on the freedom of workers to join labor unions.
No, they want even more wealth and covet even more of the power—and don’t want to share any of it with their workers, or any other American workers.
Evidently, they believe that today’s Supreme Court—packed with right-wing justices who have few scruples about reversing long-held judicial precedents or even taking money from wealthy people with a financial interest in how they rule—will find their argument compelling.
I hope they’re wrong.
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In 'Direct Attack' on Labor Movement, Amazon Backs Claim NLRB Is Unconstitutional
"So now capital, unable to hold back labor any longer, is arguing that the NLRB's very existence is unconstitutional," said one law professor.
Feb 16, 2024
Amid a recent surge in unionization and other workers' rights victories, wealthy U.S. corporations have fired union organizers, surveilled employees as they voted on forming a collective bargaining unit, and closed store locations to penalize labor leaders—but a court filing by Amazon on Thursday suggested a new tactic as the e-commerce giant seeks to dismantle the federal agency tasked with protecting employees.
Fighting accusations from prosecutors at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that Amazon illegally retaliated against warehouse workers who unionized, the company submitted a legal filing arguing that the board itself is unconstitutional.
Amazon claimed it did not break the law by limiting workers' access to the warehouse, which the NLRB said last year was a transparent effort to quash union activity. In its filing, the company also claimed "the structure of the NLRB violates the separation of powers" by "impeding the executive power provided for in Article II of the United States Constitution."
The company is the third corporation to make such a claim in recent weeks.
In January, a lawyer for grocery chain Trader Joe's argued in an NLRB hearing over union-busting charges that the board, which was created nearly 90 years ago under the New Deal, is "unconstitutional"—"including but not limited to the structure and organization of the National Labor Relations Board and the agency's administrative law judges."
That claim came weeks after astronautics company SpaceX, owned by Tesla CEO Elon Musk—currently the second-richest person on Earth—claimed the NLRB's enforcement proceedings violate the company's right to a jury trial.
Amazon echoed that claim on Thursday.
Seth Goldstein, an attorney for Trader Joe's United, which sued the grocer over illegal retaliation, said last month that the company's argument suggested that workers "don't have the right to organize at all."
"This is really dangerous," Goldstein toldHuffPost. "Are we really going back to 1920?"
On Thursday, he called Amazon's decision to launch its own anti-NLRB legal argument "a direct attack on the American labor movement and workers' rights."
Amazon's filing follows more than 250 NLRB complaints against its labor practices in recent years. In 2022, employees at the company's JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, New York won what was called a "David versus Goliath" victory, defeating Amazon's multimillion-dollar anti-union effort by voting to form the Amazon Labor Union (ALU).
"So now capital, unable to hold back labor any longer, is arguing that the NLRB's very existence is unconstitutional," said Cornell Law School professor Robert Hockett.
Former New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse pointed out that the new anti-union efforts by Amazon and SpaceX are being led by two of the richest men in the world—Musk and Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos.
"Billionaires," said Christian Smalls, president of ALU and fired Amazon worker, "they gotta go!"
Corporate interests have previously worked to dismantle regulatory agencies tasked with protecting working Americans, with a trade association representing payday lenders taking its case against the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to the U.S. Supreme Court last year. The group has argued the CFPB's funding structure through the Federal Reserve is unconstitutional.
Pawel Popiel, a researcher at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, called Amazon's filing an "incredibly troubling lobbying effort."
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