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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

#111

Post by eru »

viraptor wrote: post #25
meddlepal wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Tesla should be allowed every opportunity to stop them. I guess Tesla broke the law in this case, but I do not really agree with the ruling and the law. Musk should be allowed to present the possible downsides.

> allowed every opportunity Unless you're also happy about shooting people starting a union or striking, you should read this article to learn why this is a really bad idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_th...

Compare and contrast https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/

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

#112

Post by eru »

fastball wrote: post #75
joshuamorton wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downside musk presented was a lie though: a union could absolutely bargain for stock options.

But Tesla could outright refuse under any circumstances to give stock options to unionized employees, no? That's their prerogative. Also FWIW Musk clarified that he was talking about the fact that no UAW employees have stock options at any other company.

> But Tesla could outright refuse under any circumstances to give stock options to unionized employees, no?

Not sure what the laws are. There might be laws saying that you can't discriminate against people in unions, so in order not to hand stock options to unionized employees, they might have to withhold stock options from all employees?

(No clue, just speculating.)

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

#113

Post by mullingitover »

koonsolo wrote: post #90
mullingitover wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting that this would be the case in Europe. Germany has had 'codetermination' laws for decades, where they have (typically union) representation on the boards of large corporations[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany

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

#114

Post by eru »

spamizbad wrote: post #42
stretchwithme wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe he has no plans to offer stock because such incentives don't really work when your labor supply is captured by a monopoly.

Is the implication here stock options are only offered to labor when its in a weak bargaining position because otherwise they could be demanding something more valuable?

Tesla is a publicly traded company. It's relatively easy to put a market value on their stock options.

> [...] because otherwise they could be demanding something more valuable?

Like twice as many stock options? I'm a bit confused. Stock options are fungible. You can make granting of stock options worth arbitrary many dollars, by eg increasing the volume or lowering the strike price etc.

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

#115

Post by joshuamorton »

fastball wrote: post #75
joshuamorton wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downside musk presented was a lie though: a union could absolutely bargain for stock options.

But Tesla could outright refuse under any circumstances to give stock options to unionized employees, no? That's their prerogative. Also FWIW Musk clarified that he was talking about the fact that no UAW employees have stock options at any other company.

> But Tesla could outright refuse under any circumstances to give stock options to unionized employees, no?

I mean yes. And then a union could strike. At which point elon would have a decision to make: is proving a dumb point worth his business?

> Also FWIW Musk clarified

Presumably on lawyers advice.

> no UAW employees have stock options at any other company.

But that,as others have explained, isn't relevant. Nothing stops the Tesla union from maintaining those perks, and options aren't valuable at most auto companies anyway, so aiming for different perks is superior.

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

#116

Post by eru »

npad wrote: post #64
justin66 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Unionized ESOP companies aren't uncommon. You've got it a bit backwards about the adversarial relationship: having an ESOP and a union isn't some kind of organizational impossibility, and it can decrease the probability of a serious dispu…

Interesting, yeah those are good points. I can certainly see it reducing the severity of disputes in theory. In practice though I'm skeptical. I've read a little about the history of UAW. They really seemed to view workers vs mgmt as an adversarial zero sum game. Meanwhile Toyota were developing their production system using the kaizen principle of bottom up continuous improvement. Unions played a huge role in making…

So it depends a bit on whether you talk about real world US unions like the UAW, or about what unions could be in theory and might be in other parts of the world.

Eg German unions have a reputation, at least compared to the US, of cooperating much more with their host companies. Similar also for Scandinavian unions.

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

#117

Post by dnautics »

cma wrote: post #94
dnautics wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for behaviours, yes, but for rhetoric, you're toeing a very dangerous line up against the 1st amendment.

In the end I think courts will say the promised anti-union rollercoaster and yogurt complexes must be built. Fraudulent promises as part of commerce and labor negotiation are excluded from protection under pretty much every interpretation of the 1st amendment out there. https://elonmusk.today/#frozen-yogurt-rollercoasters

IANAL, but if it's not in writing, I believe you have to prove that musk never intended to deliver, and that's gonna be hard to prove. Otherwise you can nail people down to a few hundred prosecutable offenses a year and that is not a recipe for social success when there are sufficient numbers of vindictive jerks around.

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

#118

Post by dragonwriter »

darawk wrote: post #96
dragonwriter wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think it's fair to call a modern mixed economy "Marxist". Marx didn't really advocate anything in particular in terms of economic organization. He had no clear idea of how his world would operate, and that's why Leninism was able to fill the void in the way that it did. Marx's ideas were fundamentally negative in nature. He was opposed to things, and had sharp and perceptive critiques of capitalism, but he di…

> I don't think it's fair to call a modern mixed economy "Marxist".

It's at least as fair as it is to call Leninism Marxist.

> Marx didn't really advocate anything in particular in terms of economic organization.

Yes, he did.

> Leninism was able to fill the void in the way that it did.

Leninism didn't fill a void, it made deliberate changes to apply to very different conditions those addresses by Marx’s writing (which addressed mature capitalist societies and where he saw that they should go next to resolve problems he saw as inherent to their system.)

> but he didn't really present an alternative.

Yes, he did, though Marx was very big on path dependency, so his recommendations were more specific when directed at more specific conditions. Capital is pretty pure critique of the then-status-quo, The Communist Manifesto has a fairly broad program, but narrower and less-well-known works like the Demands of the Communist Party in Germany, Programme of the French Workers Party have quite specific policy proposals.

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

#119

Post by sershe »

dundarious wrote: post #16
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?

That logic doesn't hold if you share a belief in Tesla's stated mission "to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport", and also want to be in a union -- which is a reasonable set of beliefs and desires to hold. And I don't see how unions would be intrinsically incompatible with Tesla's mission or operations. There's no reason I know of to hold that it is an immutable fact that Tesla's workers are non-union -- s…

Tesla doesn't owe them a job. They can make their own company, make it unionized, and make it popular.

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

#120

Post by eru »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #40
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.

Individual employees have every bit as adversarial a relationship to management as union members. They just have much less bargaining power.

What do you mean by less bargaining power?

As an individual I feel like I have relatively more bargaining power, because when eg talking about pay I just need to convince the company to bump one total comp package, mine.

So I can negotiate much more aggressively and get more done, then someone who tried to get the company to raise thousands of pay packages.

Also, I have an easy time convincing the company that I am leaving (or not joining), if they don't accede to my demands.

No union can credibly threaten that all unionized employees will quit, if they don't get a 40% pay rise.

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