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Elon Musk’s anti-union tweet from 2018 must be deleted: U.S. labor board

reuters.com

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Re: Elon Musk’s anti-union tweet from 2018 must be deleted: U.S. labor board

#81

Post by [deleted] »

fastball wrote: post #77
telaelit wrote: post #55

I wish the NRLB would be much harsher against business owners and executives who engage in anti-union rhetoric and behaviors. People have the right to form unions, lying about losing benefits and lowering pay should be handled much more harshly, there should be actual penalties instead of just having to read a statement and delete a tweet.

Isn't the entire point of a union to give you negotiating leverage? If you need the government to effectively do the negotiating for you by levying fines and such whenever the company goes against the union, what exactly is the point of the union?

[deleted]

Re: Elon Musk’s anti-union tweet from 2018 must be deleted: U.S. labor board

#82

Post by dragonwriter »

fakename11 wrote: post #62
dragonwriter wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Labor, Capital - jeez there's plenty of countries built on Marxist ideology you are advocating. No, there aren't. There are plenty of countries built on Leninist (and it's descendants, including Maoist) ideology, which advertise themselves as being Marxist as well, but Leninism sharply deviates from Marxism on a number of key points largely because Marxism is grounded in the necessity of starting with mature capita…

[flagged]

Whether or not Leninism is real Socialism is a different question (there's a reason, though, why other socialists, including Marxists, have called it State Capitalism, though.)!

What is undisputable is that these are three different things:

1. Recognizing the conflict between labor and capital as a real and significant factor in capitalist society, and

2. Advocating Marxism, and

3. Advocating Leninism.

The societies in which Marxism has been most broadly applied are the developed “capitalist” societies, which have generally evolved from what Marx described as capitalism to what has been called (among other things) as “the modern mixed economy”, by adopting both elements of programs of various (in many cases, Marxist) critics of capitalism, or compromise positions.

There are also societies, which never were mature capitalist societies, that have tried to bypass mature capitalism and apply the Leninist course. Advocates laissez-faire capitalism like to point to these as a broad argument against socialism, while advocates of non-Leninist socialism tend to point to them as as arguments against the Leninism as a useful approach to socialism, whether or not they accept it as a genuine socialism.

Re: Elon Musk’s anti-union tweet from 2018 must be deleted: U.S. labor board

#83

Post by upbeat_general »

DudeInBasement wrote: post #7

If they want to work for the UAW, then they should join GM or other factories. Why join Tesla if you really wanted to work for the UAW?

I don’t understand this logic at all.

Just because one company is partially unionized that does not mean that all workers who wish to be part of a union try to work at that company. Maybe the working conditions changed (for the worse), or maybe the worker doesn’t want to move to another state just to work for a company that is unionized. Either way, it’s not like there’s a 1 company quota in every industry that can be unionized and then bam problem solved.

Re: Elon Musk’s anti-union tweet from 2018 must be deleted: U.S. labor board

#84

Post by snypher »

npad wrote: post #32
sharkjacobs wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing? If you don't think that Elon means employees will lose their stock options if they unionize, then what does he mean?

I'm taking it to mean union employees wouldn't get new grants. Which makes sense to me - I have a hard time squaring how you can be in a union with an adversarial relationship to management, whilst at the same time being an owner of the company. It's one or the other.

"owner of the company"?

This is common anti-union rhetoric. Am I an owner, with my $600 stock, and can I convince 89.5% of the other stock holders to vote with me?[0] Doesn't sound like ownership.

[0] see supermajority voting

Re: Elon Musk’s anti-union tweet from 2018 must be deleted: U.S. labor board

#86

Post by dragonwriter »

mrkstu wrote: post #58
dragonwriter wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All economies consist of labor and capital vying for resources Economies without property rights in capital do not. They may have other (and even more significant) problems, but they don't have that one.

An example of such an economy IRL?

Lots of small-community, low-tech societies (very much “pre-capitalist” in the view of either capitalist or Marxist teleogical economic descriptions).

Re: Elon Musk’s anti-union tweet from 2018 must be deleted: U.S. labor board

#87

Post by markdown »

garyfirestorm wrote: post #76
avs733 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Detroit did this to themselves. They failed to innovate and got beat by the Japanese on quality. That wasn’t the unions fault, but the union gets blamed. The unions complaints were only that they were gonna get left holding the bag when things got bad while the c suite floated off with full pockets..and they were right.

Your comment unfortunately doesn’t match reality. The uaw people literally avoid any kind of work. I wouldn’t say all of them, but majority of them do. There is zero accountability. They behave with almost no regard to professional rules, they treat foreign nationals as hostile people. No concept of teamwork. First hand experience btw. They have turned simplest of the simple tasks into bureaucratic nightmare, need a…

Be glad you aren't slaving from 6am to 6pm. Unions fought for the privileges you enjoy now, whether or not you are yourself in a Union.

Further, if more people joined and supported Unions, Americans might one day get to enjoy the work/life balance that most of the rest of the world enjoys, with sufficient vacation time, paternity and maternity leave, etc.

Re: Elon Musk’s anti-union tweet from 2018 must be deleted: U.S. labor board

#88

Post by foerbert »

fastball wrote: post #77
telaelit wrote: post #55

I wish the NRLB would be much harsher against business owners and executives who engage in anti-union rhetoric and behaviors. People have the right to form unions, lying about losing benefits and lowering pay should be handled much more harshly, there should be actual penalties instead of just having to read a statement and delete a tweet.

Isn't the entire point of a union to give you negotiating leverage? If you need the government to effectively do the negotiating for you by levying fines and such whenever the company goes against the union, what exactly is the point of the union?

Huh?

Don't roads exist to facilitate vehicle transportation? If you need to do construction in order to make roads, what exactly is the point of them?

I don't understand what your thinking here is. You're comparing the expected results of a thing existing with possible actions to facilitate conditions for that thing to exist. Why are these supposed to be somehow equivalent or comparable?

Re: Elon Musk’s anti-union tweet from 2018 must be deleted: U.S. labor board

#89

Post by optimiz3 »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #74
wtfrmyinitials wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may be confused, but your comment appears to be a bit of a non sequitur.

GGP asked whether collective action returns a sustainable slice of corporate revenues, i.e. do unions demand so much that it harms the company. I’m saying that they should look at executive compensation through the same lens.

Elon isn't hired management. He built the company, and risked all of his personal assets in doing so.

Re: Elon Musk’s anti-union tweet from 2018 must be deleted: U.S. labor board

#90

Post by koonsolo »

mullingitover wrote: post #37
npad wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm taking it to mean union employees wouldn't get new grants. Which makes sense to me - I have a hard time squaring how you can be in a union with an adversarial relationship to management, whilst at the same time being an owner of the company. It's one or the other.

Why are these things at odds? It seems like the ideal outcome for the union would be to have a significant ownership stake in the company and share in its success, rather than have an adversarial relationship and drag down profits. Making the company uncompetitive in the market is bad for the union in the long run.

Representatives of the union see the world differently. They don't see collaboration on the same goal, they see rich management exploiting employees to get even richer.

So it's really an us vs them mentality. Either I get richer, or you get richer. Don't expect these people to start reasoning about making the company they work for competitive.

At least this is the case in europe.

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