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I'm a Veteran of Organized Auto Boycotts. My Advice to Tesla? Dump Musk
During the Great Recession, I organized a Toyota boycott that accidentally paved the way for Musk’s rise. Musk probably won’t tell that story, so I will.
Jul 03, 2025
Elon Musk's alliance with Donald Trump may be over for now, but the Tesla brand has yet to recover from Musk's high profile foray into far-right politics.
Tesla stock has plummeted precipitously ever since Musk’s embrace of Donald Trump last year. It’s been enough to alarm board members, who are now considering replacing Musk as CEO as public “Tesla Takedown” protests have spread across the country.
Ironically, Musk himself was the beneficiary of a similar boycott years ago — a boycott I ran. And since Musk himself is unlikely to relay the story, I will.
In the aftermath of the 2008 market collapse, Toyota announced plans to shutter its Fremont, California factory and move production to Japan, Canada, Mexico, and Mississippi. Not surprisingly, outrage ensued. Soon after, I received a call from the incoming United Auto Workers president Bob King, who asked me to devise a campaign to challenge the Toyota closing.
For Toyota, it was about abandoning California. For Musk, it’s been about dismantling our government and attacking union rights, among other misdeeds.
The strategy we landed on was to reframe this struggle from one borne by workers alone to one that emphasized the broader damage to California’s economy that the closure would cause.
Back then in California, one of every four vehicles sold was a Toyota. As the New York Times’ Bob Herbert wrote in 2010, the U.S. was “the largest market for Toyota vehicles in the world, larger even than Japan.” And the Corolla, built at the Fremont facility, was “the best-selling car of all time.”
But it was that very success that made them vulnerable.
We knew Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays were the prime sales days for most car dealerships. We dispatched our ground troops to cover those three days of the week, in shifts of 8 to 10 people, to 50 dealerships in California and 50 more throughout the United states, holding banners proclaiming, “Toyota Kills California Jobs.”
The company’s sales managers panicked, with several complaining to me personally that their sales were hurting. On April 1, 2010, Toyota shuttered the Fremont factory as they had previously announced, but our boycott continued.
Two weeks later, faced with our ongoing boycott, Toyota president Akio Toyoda, the grandson of the company's founder, called Elon Musk, flew to Los Angeles to meet Musk for dinner, and offered a $50 million cash infusion if Musk would take over the old Fremont plant and hire from the laid off workforce.
Musk had been on the brink of signing a deal to open a Tesla plant in Southern California, but this offer — and the boycott that prompted it — abruptly changed his plans.
Not long after, those Fremont workers were making Teslas instead of Toyotas — and employment at the plant has skyrocketed from 4,700 then to over 20,000 today. Musk went on to become the world’s wealthiest man.
Now, Toyota president Akio Toyoda wasn’t exactly like today’s Musk when it comes to public notoriety. But there are some striking similarities between the two cases.
Both car companies claim to be leaders of environmentally sustainable transportation. Like the Prius before it, a drive through any upscale retail parking lot from Los Angeles to New York City today will similarly show a high proportion of Tesla sedans, bought during less fraught times by environmentally conscious consumers.
And both companies have suffered from a strong sense of betrayal among their most loyal customer base. For Toyota, it was about abandoning California. For Musk, it’s been about dismantling our government and attacking union rights, among other misdeeds.
Today, the cratering of Tesla’s stock value, coinciding with nationwide anti-Musk protests at Tesla dealerships, reinforces two important truisms fundamental to a free market: public opinion of brands still affects stock value, and a CEO's behavior can trigger lasting backlash against their brand.
So as the organizer of the boycott that accidentally helped along Musk’s rise to prominence, what’s my advice for the Tesla board today? Make Musk divest his shares and move on.
It’s likely that nothing else will quell these protests.
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Toyota Exposed for Funding Climate Denialism Designed to Slow EV Transition
"Instead of innovating, Toyota has bankrolled lobbyists and climate-hostile lawmakers to help it defeat EVs," according to Public Citizen.
Jan 14, 2025
Nearly three decades after its introduction, the hybrid Toyota Prius is still associated with environmental action and the scientific consensus that fossil fuel emissions, including those from vehicles, must be reduced to avoid the worst effects of planetary heating.
But a Tuesday report from watchdog group Public Citizen reveals how Toyota has spent recent years becoming the largest funder of U.S. lawmakers who deny the existence of the climate emergency, and a major opponent to the expansion of electric vehicles.
In the report, titled Driving Denial, senior clean vehicles campaigner Adam Zuckerman explains how Toyota has emerged over the last three election cycles as the auto industry's top financial backer of climate deniers in Congress—donating to 207 of their campaigners.
Top climate-denying beneficiaries of Toyota include U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who received $10,000 from Toyota in during the 2024 cycle—the maximum amount allowed—and Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), who received $7,000 after he called for the end of EV tax credits and demanded the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) be eliminated.
Between 2020-24, Toyota's political action committee (PAC) has contributed tens of thousands of dollars to right-wing lawmakers including Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), David Schweikert (R-Ariz.) and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.)—giving a total of "$808,500 to the campaigns of congressional candidates that deny or question the existence of climate change," according to Public Citizen.
Despite Toyota's reputation as a hybrid car innovator, said Zuckerman, "the world's largest automaker has quietly spent the past several years building a powerful U.S. influence operation in an effort to delay the transition to electric vehicles."
"Funding a small army of climate-denying lawmakers, while lobbying aggressively against stronger emissions and fuel economy standards, is a volatile combination intended to roll back policies that protect our communities and planet," he said.
In addition to financing the campaigns of lawmakers who deny that fossil fuel emissions are heating the planet and contributing to more extreme wildfires, hurricanes, and other disasters, Toyota has also directly pushed back against climate regulations.
Three days after President-elect Donald Trump won the November election, Toyota Motor North America executive Jack Hollis falsely called tailpipe emissions standards introduced by California and the EPA "EV mandates" and claimed they will "remove consumer choice."
"Funding a small army of climate-denying lawmakers, while lobbying aggressively against stronger emissions and fuel economy standards, is a volatile combination intended to roll back policies that protect our communities and planet."
Hollis also wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed called on the incoming Trump administration to dismantle Biden-era policies that push automakers to reduce emissions, and in December, Toyota announced it was donating $1 million to Trump's inauguration
"Instead of embracing a green energy future, Toyota has aggressively lobbied to delay and weaken climate action," Public Citizen's report reads.
Toyota's advocacy "has borne results," notes the report. "During the Biden administration, lobbying from Toyota and others forced the EPA to weaken an ambitious EPA plan to limit vehicle emissions. The changes slow the adoption of more stringent vehicle pollution limits, making it easier for EV laggards like Toyota to meet regulations without building electric vehicles."
While billing itself as a global climate leader in recent decades, Toyota was named by InfluenceMap as the third-worst company in the world for anti-climate lobbying, after only fossil fuel giants Chevron and ExxonMobil.
InfluenceMap's 2024 scorecard "highlights Toyota's lobbying efforts against emissions standards in the U.S. and Australia and against EV mandates in Canada and the United Kingdom, as well as Toyota's success in weakening emissions stands in the U.S. and fuel efficiency standards in Australia," reads the Public Citizen report.
While ramping up its lobbying efforts Toyota has invested in carbon-intensive hydrogen-powered vehicles such as the Mirai, a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle (HFCV) introduced in 2014. The Mirai has sold fewer than 25,000 units and has failed to provide consumers with the infrastructure needed for HFCVs, with just 60 hydrogen refueling stations in the U.S. and Canada—leading to a class action lawsuit against the automaker.
The company has pursued "a risky strategy that has left Toyota vulnerable to an influx of competitors who have leapfrogged the auto giant to build the next generation of vehicles," reads the report. "Instead of innovating, Toyota has bankrolled lobbyists and climate-hostile lawmakers to help it defeat EVs."
According to the report, the automaker's abandonment of EV innovation and embrace of climate denial begs the question: "In 20 years, how will the world think of Toyota?"
EVs, said Zuckerman, "are the future of the automotive industry, and if it fails to evolve, Toyota risks becoming the next Kodak or Blockbuster, corporate giants that fought innovation and paid the price for it."
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More Than 10K Workers Have Signed UAW Cards Since Big Three Wins
"These workers are standing up for themselves, for their families, and for their communities, and our union will have their back every step of the way," UAW president Shawn Fain said.
Jan 29, 2024
More than 10,000 U.S. autoworkers have recently signed union cards with the United Autoworkers Union, the UAWannounced on Monday.
The news comes less than 90 days after UAW members ratified historic contracts with the Big Three automakers following their successful "Stand Up" strike.
"Our Stand Up movement has caught fire among America's autoworkers, far beyond the Big Three," UAW president Shawn Fainsaid in a statement. "These workers are standing up for themselves, for their families, and for their communities, and our union will have their back every step of the way."
"Seeing the contracts that they [were] able to get, it was just astounding."
When Fain announced the UAW's tentative deals with Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, he said one of the union's major goals going forward would be to unionize more nonunion plants.
"When we return to the bargaining table in 2028, it won't just be with the Big Three. It will be the Big Five or Big Six," Fain said at the time.
After ratifying the contacts, the UAW announced a plan to unionize 150,000 employees working for 13 non-union carmakers. Since then, workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and a Mercedes plant in Vance, Alabama, have gone public with their union campaigns. At Volkswagen, 2,000 out of 5,500 workers have signed union cards, Local 3 News reported. Washington Post labor reporter Lauren Kaori Gurley said on social media that the Mercedes campaign was also nearing majority support.
The current tally of more than 10,000 cards are divided across all 13 target companies, the UAW said. Gurley predicted that the union would hold elections at Volkswagen and Toyota before the end of the year.
More Perfect Union spoke to workers involved in the organizing drive at the world's largest Toyota plant in Georgetown, Kentucky.
When the plant first opened in 1988, it provided high wages and good benefits, but compensation began to decline following the 2008 recession, despite the fact that Toyota's profits continued to rise. Employee Jeff Allen, who started working there nearly 30 years ago, said the job enabled him to buy a home and a new car early in his career. However, four-year employee Greg Williams said he could not afford to purchase a home and his fiance and two daughters had to rely on Medicaid for their healthcare.
"I totaled a car last week and I can't afford to replace it," Williams said.
Past union drives at Toyota have failed, but workers said they were newly energized by what the UAW won from the Big Three in 2023.
"Seeing the contracts that they [were] able to get, it was just astounding," Allen said. "And I'm like, you know, we could do that. We should do that."
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As UAW Ramps Up Organizing, Tesla Boosts Wages for US Factory Workers
"This is the latest sign that Elon Musk is scared of the UAW push to unionize all nonunion autoworkers across the country."
Jan 11, 2024
The electric vehicle maker Tesla has reportedly informed workers at its California plant that it is hiking wages for factory employees across the United States, becoming the latest nonunion car manufacturer to boost worker pay following the United Auto Workers' historic strike and contract victories late last year.
Bloomberg reported Thursday that all of Tesla's production associates, material handlers, and quality inspectors will receive a "market adjustment pay increase" to start 2024, according to a flyer that company management posted at its Fremont, California plant—which employs more than 20,000 workers.
The document did not make clear the size of the raise, Bloomberg noted.
Tesla is run by billionaire Elon Musk, who has been vocally hostile toward organized labor for years—a stance that has drawn scrutiny and rebukes from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). In a 2018 post on Twitter, a platform he now owns and rebranded as X, Musk wrote that there is "nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union."
"But why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing?" he added. The NLRB said the post constituted an unlawful threat against workers considering exercising their right to organize.
After the UAW secured significant wage increases and other contract wins at the Big Three U.S. automakers following a six-week strike last year, the union launched what's been described as the largest organizing drive in modern U.S. history, targeting Volkswagen, Toyota, and other nonunion car makers. (Volkswagen and Toyota both raised workers' wages following the UAW's contract victories.)
On Wednesday, the union announced that more than 30% of the workers at a Mercedes-Benz plant in Tuscaloosa, Alabama have signed union cards.
"I feel like we're living to work when we should be working to live," said Moesha Chandler, an assembly team member at the Tuscaloosa factory. "I started as a temp making $17.50 an hour. I'm full-time now, but I'm still living paycheck to paycheck. If I have a shopping spree, it's for my work clothes, not fun clothes. If we had the union, we'd feel more protected, more at ease. We wouldn't feel like a gazelle to a lion."
Emboldened by its recent contract victories, UAW is also setting its sights on Tesla. Bloomberg reported in late October that the union has "committed to providing whatever resources are necessary" to organize Tesla's Fremont factory.
Workers at the plant have formed an organizing committee and have been discussing unionization with their fellow employees, according to Bloomberg.
Last week, dozens of Senate Democrats and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) sent a letter to Musk and other auto executives raising concerns over their efforts to stifle union organizing.
"For example, according to employee accounts, Volkswagen managers confiscated and destroyed pro-union materials and Hyundai supervisors unlawfully banned pro-union materials in nonwork areas outside of normal working hours," the lawmakers wrote. "In addition, the National Labor Relations Board found that Tesla employed multiple illegal tactics aimed at stopping organizing efforts including online harassment, employee interrogations, and retaliatory firings."
"These retaliatory actions are hostile to workers' rights and must not be repeated if further organizing efforts are made by these companies' workers," the senators added. "We therefore urge you to commit to implementation of a neutrality agreement at your manufacturing plants."
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'UAW Bump': Toyota Announces Raises After Union Reaches Tentative Deal With Big Three
"They did it now because the company knows we're coming for them," UAW president Shawn Fain said in response to the news.
Nov 03, 2023
Days after the United Auto Workers announced tentative deals with the Big Three carmakers, Toyota confirmed this week that it would offer raises to its nonunion U.S. factory workers.
The Japanese automaker said Wednesday that hourly manufacturers at the top of the pay scale would see a 9% raise beginning January 1, Reuters reported. UAW president Shawn Fain, who is attempting to use the union's victory to bolster the wider labor movement, said that the timing of Toyota's announcement was no coincidence.
"Toyota isn't giving out raises out of the goodness of their heart," he said in a video statement shared by More Perfect Union on Friday. "Toyota is the largest and most profitable auto company in the world. They could have just as easily raised wages a month ago or a year ago. They did it now because the company knows we're coming for them."
In the deals struck with Ford, Stellantis, and General Motors, the UAW secured a 25% pay raise over the life of the contracts. The tentative agreements brought an end to a historic six-week strike, as members return to work while they vote on whether or not to ratify the deals.
The UAW has negotiated for the three contracts to expire on April 30, 2028, a slightly longer lifespan than usual, according to Labor Notes. In a speech Sunday, Fain said part of the reason for the longer contracts was to give the labor movement time to build toward a potential strike on May Day 2028. Fain also said the UAW planned to spend the next four-and-a-half years organizing workers at nonunion plants owned by companies including Tesla, Volkswagen, Mercedes, BMW, Honda, Nissan, and Toyota.
"When we return to the bargaining table in 2028, it won't just be with the Big Three. It will be the Big Five or Big Six," Fain said.
"UAW. That stands for, 'You are welcome.'"
On Monday, a Toyota employee at a plant in Alabama told Labor Notes that management had called workers into an emergency meeting offering to raise top pay to $32 an hour and to scale up workers to that level in four years instead of eight. Another employee at a Kentucky plant said the top rate for production workers there had been raised by $2.94 to $34.80 and skilled trades workers saw a $3.70 boost to $43.20.
Toyota confirmed it was offering raises to news outlets Wednesday. It also said it was halving the time needed to reach top pay across the board and expanding paid time off.
"We value our employees and their contributions, and we show it by offering robust compensation packages that we continually review to ensure that we remain competitive within the automotive industry," Chris Reynolds, Toyota Motor North America's executive vice president, said in a statement reported by Reuters.
Toyota's actions are in keeping with findings that a strong union movement benefits nonunion workers as well. During the 1950s, when union membership peaked at one-third of U.S. workers, income inequality was at its lowest since the Great Depression spike, according to figures shared by the Department of the Treasury. By 2022, only 10% of U.S. workers were in a union, and the top 1% took home almost 20% of total income. If private sector union membership increases by just 1%, nonunion workers see a 0.3% wage increase.
"Even though you're not yet members of our union, that pay raise Toyota's giving you is the UAW bump," Fain addressed Toyota workers in his statement. "UAW. That stands for, 'You are welcome.'"
"You are welcome to join our Stand Up movement," he continued. "If this is what Toyota gives you when the Big Three stand up and fight, imagine what you could accomplish if you join the UAW and stand up and fight for yourselves."
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