A federal appeals court on Friday upheld a finding that Tesla illegally fired an employee involved in union organizing and that the company’s CEO, Elon Musk, had illegally threatened workers’ stock options if they decided to unionize.
The opinion, from three judges on the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, allows the National Labor Relations Board to enforce a 2021 order requiring Tesla to reinstate, with back pay, employee Richard Ortiz, and Mr. Musk to remove a Twitter post suggesting that workers could lose stock options if they unionize.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling.
The finding comes as workers at other companies run by Musk have raised concerns about labor law violations. Last year, eight former employees of SpaceX, the rocket maker run by Musk, charges filed of unfair labor practices, saying the company had retaliated against them for helping to write a letter calling for better enforcement of its stated policies on sexual harassment. The cases are pending.
In February, Tesla fired at least 18 employees as a result of a union organizing drive at a plant in Buffalo. The union seeking to represent the workers called the firings retaliatory and filed charges with the labor board. Tesla said in a sentence that the firings were the result of a semi-annual performance review and that the firing decisions had been made before the union campaign became public.
The case in question Friday dates back to 2017. At the time, Mr. Ortiz was known to be involved in an effort to unionize the company’s Fremont, California, plant, which included distributing union materials and pushing for legislation. pro-union, when he posted screenshots of his anti-union coworkers on a private Facebook page.
When a company investigator asked Ortiz where the screenshots came from, Ortiz said he couldn’t remember, though a colleague had sent him the images after getting them from an internal human resources site. Mr. Ortiz later admitted that his response was a lie, and the company claimed that he fired him for the false statement.
The labor board concluded that Mr. Ortiz had been fired because he was involved in union activities, not because he had lied. The circuit court agreed that “substantial evidence” pointed to the conclusion that “union animosity prompted the complaint, the investigation, and the decision to fire Ortiz.”
Musk’s May 2018 post on stock options said there was nothing stopping Tesla employees at the plant from voting for a union, adding: “But why pay union dues and waive stock options for nothing?
Tesla argued that the statement was a direct prediction based on Mr. Musk’s understanding that other members of the United Automobile Workers union did not receive stock options, and that his benign intent was made clear in subsequent posts in the same thread.
But the labor board concluded that the employees would have interpreted the post as a threat to remove their stock options if they chose to unionize, and ordered Musk to remove it. The circuit court agreed, saying the board could enforce its order.
