Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 623 posts

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

#421

Post by kergonath »

kepler1 wrote: post #409
door100 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The horrors of... a 35 hour workweek, 5 weeks paid vacation, 16 weeks paid maternity leave, universal healthcare, and no at-will employment?

Ah, classic selection bias blinders on. Sure, great benefits for those who have jobs. What about for the people who can't get employed due to the conditions on labor? The young, poor, already jobless? Not so much concern for them, you got yours.

I am not sure the American underclass (a large part of Trump’s support base) is faring much better. Even with larger unemployment, inequalities are still not as bad as in the US. Several countries have similar problems, whether it takes the form of 10% unemployment or working-class poor.

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

#422

Post by joshuamorton »

cwhiz wrote: post #238
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.

I disagree. It should be a free market. If the employees don’t like their treatment they should leave and take a different job. I am sure there is a UAW job out there to be had. The most likely outcome from this is that Tesla moves more and more production out of a California and into a more business friendly state, such as Texas.

Or Alabama? Which would never get a union...

Unions are an aspect of a free market. They're an organization of individuals with a common goal in exactly the same way corporations are.

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

#423

Post by kergonath »

karaterobot wrote: post #374
KaiserPro wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, the level of inequity in france is nowhere near as much as USA. Sure there arn't as many mega rich, but then there arn't people hundreds of thousands of people being bankrupted by medical bills either.

Given that the yellow vest protests have been going on for two and a half years now, I would not hold up France as a model for income equality. The U.S. may be a decade in advance of most countries in this respect, but there's no indication I can find that France has the problem solved with its approach.

> there's no indication I can find that France has the problem solved with its approach

They certainly haven’t. However, the yellow vests movement fizzled out a long time ago. And union-bashing certainly isn’t the way to go if you care about equality, however imperfect they are.

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

#424

Post by whatinthewhy »

marricks wrote: post #338
clcaev wrote: post #314

The entire concept of unionization seems unnecessarily confrontational. It does not need to be this way. Corporations are creations of the state. There is nothing preventing the state to require significant representation of employees in every board of directors. This board representation could support management that better reflects employee participation, e.g. Sociocracy. In this way, labour and capital could work…

I agree, if one wants to avoid the conflict of a union a work place should be at least 51% employee owned. Short of having mandatory employee ownership unions are the next best thing, and one is far easier in the US. Otherwise we have what we have now, rampant unfairness and tension but no conflict because the board can get away with whatever conditions PR allows them to get away with.

Why 51%? Why not split labor ownership equally with capital?

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

#425

Post by heavyset_go »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #320
aphextron wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The most that individuals will have to pay out-of-pocket in 2020 is $8,200 and $16,400 for families. If you have good insurance, sure. If you're unemployed, one bad illness or injury means instant bankruptcy.

We have ACA now, anyone can get affordable insurance.

Tell that to the millions of people who live in states that never expanded Medicaid under the ACA.

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

#426

Post by knz_ »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #320
aphextron wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The most that individuals will have to pay out-of-pocket in 2020 is $8,200 and $16,400 for families. If you have good insurance, sure. If you're unemployed, one bad illness or injury means instant bankruptcy.

We have ACA now, anyone can get affordable insurance.

No, they can't. When I was poor and working full-time for $15/hr the best I could get was a bare minimum healthcare plan that would have taken more than the free money I had after rent and food for the month -- and this was despite not paying any cost for transportation to work and not owning a car or buying anything besides rent, food and the cheapest MVNO phone plan I could find.

I didn't live in a high CoL area either. Everyone who isn't wealthy or socially connected to get a job that pays above average is priced out of visiting a doctor at all right now.

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

#427

Post by heavyset_go »

natch wrote: post #355
hnarn wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a very pro-union guy, so I'll give my five cents just for the sake of discussion: Firstly, I don't know the context in which this was tweeted, but looking at it, it's not in my opinion egregiously or "obviously" anti-union, but the definition of this is of course a legal one and not a subjective one, so it doesn't really matter what any of us "think" is anti-union, what matters is the legal text in the region whe…

You're talking about whether the most visible champion of Dogecoin, whose formal title at his company is Techking, and who added a fart-on-demand feature to his products, and saying that one of his tweets regarding a currently non-existent party, a Tesla union organization, is unprofessional. Labels like "unprofessional" are repugnant to some people, because they have been, and continue to be, used to justify arbitra…

> I doubt this is a good standard to go for when trying to engage Elon

I agree, it's a much better to cut through the BS and go straight for the time that Musk and Tesla tried to have a former employee murdered by the police by accusing them of being a mass shooter[1] all because Musk thought the employee was a whistleblower for public safety.

I think that incident illustrates Musk's attitude towards Tesla employees well.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-13/when-elon...

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

#428

Post by heavyset_go »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #317
clcaev wrote: post #314

The entire concept of unionization seems unnecessarily confrontational. It does not need to be this way. Corporations are creations of the state. There is nothing preventing the state to require significant representation of employees in every board of directors. This board representation could support management that better reflects employee participation, e.g. Sociocracy. In this way, labour and capital could work…

The biggest confusion I have is everybody seems to approach Amazon and Tesla unionization as "hopefully it happens so workers will get better wages!" I could be wrong but... I'm pretty sure Amazon and Tesla pay great relative to their space. Relatively demanding, sure. I get it. We've all seen the article where some Amazon worker urinated in a bottle because "the job is just so ruthless!". They employ hundreds of tho…

Amazon is the company that knows its drivers are peeing in bottles to meet their quotas[1], but then tweets things like this in response[2]:

> You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us. The truth is that we have over a million incredible employees around the world who are proud of what they do, and have great wages and health care from day one.

[1] https://theintercept.com/2021/03/25/amazon-drivers-pee-bottl...

[2] https://twitter.com/amazonnews/status/1374911222361956359

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

#429

Post by sascha_sl »

clcaev wrote: post #314

The entire concept of unionization seems unnecessarily confrontational. It does not need to be this way. Corporations are creations of the state. There is nothing preventing the state to require significant representation of employees in every board of directors. This board representation could support management that better reflects employee participation, e.g. Sociocracy. In this way, labour and capital could work…

This sounds like "we don't need unions if we mandate unions". Many countries do this, and with success.

The actual only way that capital and workers can have a non-adversarial relationship is if the workers are in control of the capital. Otherwise capital will always be leverage used to extract surplus value from workers. That, on a large scale, is socialism by the way.

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

#430

Post by concordDance »

Jonnax wrote: post #386
concordDance wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politicians should not be threatening to silence people or companies, regardless of whether the latter are lying or treating people badly. If Amazon is breaking employment law or anti-monopoly law or anything else it can be fined or broken up. What it should not be is silenced.

https://www.businessinsider.com/elizabeth-warren-amazon-twit... I've quote the tweets below. Warren has been campaigning to break up large tech companies. What is so unprofessional about that? Clearly if she was to try and get them fined or broken up it would be through these laws. She isn't silencing them. She's saying that there'll be consequences. And Amazon's PR isn't a small company. They can take the heat. I do…

The alarming thing is her thinking that power is required to be able to heckle senators.

Anyone should be able to heckle senators on twittwr! From Mark Zuckerberg to the homeless man in the nearby park!

Post reply on HN