Tesla’s ban on pro-union shirts is illegal and must be rescinded, NLRB rules | Hacker News Reader

Tesla’s ban on pro-union shirts is illegal and must be rescinded, NLRB rules

arstechnica.com

100 pointsTomte60 comments

Weird, The guy who wants to buy Twitter to enable free speech wants to also ban a slogan on a T-shirt.

No, I think he wants to ban a slogan on a work uniform. Much more limited scope.

Twitter is a product that is seen as a digital town square.

I don't see Twitter as a digital town square. I also don't see town squares as being a shouting arena.

It is enough of a digital town square that politicians from local all the way to federal make proclamations on it, as well as there being legal precedent prohibiting politicians from blocking their constituents.

To add more details, the legal precedent on this only says government accounts' posts and account pages are their own public-square-type place, not the entire Twitter service. Personal accounts when used for government-like purposes by government officials count too.

Federal what? The Russian federation? Also, why are people constantly attempting to compare a website to a square in a town?

(for those not reading between the lines: most of the world doesn't live in the US, and most of the world also doesn't assign special privilege to town squares, digital or otherwise)

The last bit of the second paragraph would of been a fine comment on its own without the snark.

That aside; this is an American website discussing an article about an American company having a ruling made against them by an American organization based on actions they took in America. I don't think the rest of the world is relevant to this discussion, and I don't think you do either.

Twitter is a mall. You can get kicked out of a mall and not be allowed back in.

I think of twitter as being a communal ball pit.

Metaphors considered harmful.

He's pro-free speech so long as the speech isn't workers exercising their legal rights. =)

So Twitter, a private company with a well established and legally enshrined moderation policy is a public forum, but Tesla, run by a free speech activist and with no established dress code, isn’t. I look forward to see Elon clocking in and out and wearing appropriate work attire.

No, what was at issue was precisely their creation of a dress code:

> The NLRB's 3-2 decision went along party lines, with Republicans dissenting. The Democratic majority said it "found that it was unlawful for Tesla to maintain a policy requiring employees to wear a plain black T-shirt or one imprinted with the employer's logo, thus prohibiting employees from substituting a shirt bearing union insignia." Tesla's strict enforcement of the policy began in 2017, shortly after employees started wearing union shirts in a Fremont, California, factory.

They did not explicitly ban union insignia, they instituted a dress code.

This ^

Not choosing a side here, but the headline is super misleading.

The NLRB found that the dress code was a de facto ban on pro union shirts. The way the law is written (and decided), the dress code change is assumed to be an illegal de facto ban on pro-union shirts unless Tesla presents evidence that it was necessary for other reasons, which they were given an opportunity to do but failed to satisfy the majority-Democrat NLRB. I guess you only get so many characters in a headline.

Was the dress code instituted before or after people started wearing pro-union insignia?

Why does this matter? If your employees ever wanted to unionize, should that forbid you from ever instituting a new uniform requirement?

It matters because it gives an indication of whether the dress code is necessary for some reasonable reason (e.g. they want their employees to look nice) or because they were just suppressing unionisation.

The reason for doing something almost always has implications on the legality of you doing that thing. Since we don't have mindreading devices or truthtelling serum, judges use patterns and heuristics to make their best guess as to the reasons for actions.

“Tesla's strict enforcement of the policy began in 2017, shortly after employees started wearing union shirts in a Fremont, California, factory.”

Which work uniform?

Last I've heard, the employment contract of the workers in question specified no such thing.

Care to elaborate?

Does Tesla even do actual employment contracts for factory workers? They're pretty rare for non-execs

Terms of work are outlined in the job offer.

In any case, we don't seem to be talking about a workplace with official uniforms. That was a red herring by the OP.

Elon isn't a free speech absolutist. Listen to his various appearances where he's been asked about this. He said twitter should allow legal free speech, but still impose moderation on harassment and demote harmful content. He wants Twitter to give users more control over the content they see and cease it's political bias. He wants Twitter to widen it's verification program.

Most people who think Twitter needs more free speech still believe Twitter should demand a certain level of decorum and etiquette from it's users. Similar to what hacker news does. Just as an example, your comment does not follow the guidelines for this community. This stuff isn't easy.

The main thing is that actual free speech isn't possible on Twitter, otherwise it'd be free speech to create a million bot accounts to spam the platform.

Free speech doesn't mean you can say whatever you want.

Free speech mean you can say whatever you want and people have to engage in respectful debate with you and also you are free from any obligations or social consequences.

I only have to make respectful responses when dang is around.

Exactly… https://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/educational-re...

Are we taking billionaires on their word when they're talking about business decisions now? It was probably just a flex for him from the beginning

Most people when they say free speech mean “my speech/ speech I like”.

It’s also how many determine “bias” or not.

He's not banning a slogan. He has a plain black shirt dress code going back to 2017.

Huh, I thought he was free speech absolutist?

He is.

And just like every free speech absolutist I've seen, it's about free speech for him.

obviously only when it suits his needs

how many south african apartheid era emerald mines allowed union organization?

I mean to be fair his father owned those, not him. I don't think it's fair to get him for the sins of his father, and besides there's really not a lack of examples from Elon.

as much as he's tried to distance himself from his skeezy father (the guy who screwed and married his own stepdaughter who he raised from a small child, ewwww), a lot of elon's own political positions and actions taken are not any different from errol musk's positions and statements.

I mean, employers can have a dress code... that's pretty standard. Not sure I agree with this completely.

I think you're allowed to have a dress code, but if you have a dress code that says you can wear t-shirts with prints, you can't have a dress-code that disallows t-shirts with prints about union membership.

If you look at flight crew on commercial airlines, you'll obviously see that they're wearing a fairly prescriptive uniform - but they'll also frequently wear their ID cards on a lanyard with a message about their union, or about an ongoing contract negotiation.

Non-American here.

Any "lawyer" around as the laws seem very unclear.

In the case of Whole Foods vs BLM shirts, the courts ruled in favour of the "uniform" and banned the BLM shirts:

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/whole-foods-win-sho...

"The June 28 decision by the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals further restricts employees’ ability to change their working conditions at a time when U.S. workplaces have become a locus of divisive cultural battles and disagreements over some Americans’ basic rights."

In this "similar" case the ruling is drastically different?

Both attempt to "ban"clothing due to "dress code" rules?

Tesla factory employees aren't interfacing with the public, so employers have more say. I'm not sure the actual laws involved but I know certain employers have certain appearance rules. If they don't have any rules, you can't ban x and not y.

Thanks!!

I'm assuming the Pro-Union T-Shirts are referring to an attempt to unionize or an existing union in Tesla. I'm sure there are other distinctions.

Neither a lawyer nor American, my total knowledge in this area is recently listening to the podcast The Bayesian Conspiracy (168 – Unions Are Governments) which states that American unions are only allowed to act with regards to the relations between the workers and their employers and cannot engage more broadly in other political issues.

I don’t know American life, but I kinda assumed BLM was about the police and not workplace health and safety, and therefore it would be “other political issues”.

That's in places where a Union exists. No Union exists at Tesla.

The difference between the rulings is, the one you mentioned is from an actual court whereas the one in TFA is by the NLRB which is a racket (government sanctioned and funded, but most rackets are).

Biden took the unprecedented step of firing NLRB officials, who are typically appointed to fixed terms. This tends to even things out from a partisan perspective. But since Biden took this step, the NLRB is now packed with union people, with predictable results.

I would think the National Labor Relations Board would be filled with those who are acting on behalf of those doing the labor.

There are multiple perspectives within the issue, and labor is not the only perspective. And since it's the relations board, we can assume they're engaging with another party: employers. Why should the people providing the jobs not have a voice?

He fired the NLRB general counsel, not an NLR Board member/judge. This ruling, for example, was 3-2 along party lines. Calling the smallest possible democratic majority "packed" is something, especially when as I understand it it is impossible to "pack" the NLRB, it's required to have 2 democrats and 2 republicans.

Elon Musk is not your friend.

Elon Musk should have stated a uniform dress code by supplying shirts to all his employee just to be able to circumvent this NLRB regulation.

That's what this is about - there's a uniform dress code. It started in 2017. It's not a ban on union messaging - it's a ban on anything that isn't the plain black shirt.

The Elon haters are having a field day on this one.

I hate both sides of this. I don't think he's a terrible scam artist or the ticket to humanities future. I think he's obviously really smart and successful, but also clearly cocky and it feels like he's trying to prove he's one of the cool kids the way he posts on Twitter. I will give him props for getting the electric car to become an accepted thing, though I suspect his most valuable talent is his ability to market.

Yeah, this story headline is misleading and most people not applying any critical thought to this and just jumping to "space man bad"

Could a soldier wear a "soldiers' union" T-shirt instead of fatigues? Does this mean all uniform requirements are illegal now?

No. Unless you are instituting uniforms explicitly to prevent labor organization, they are perfectly fine. However, banning pro union pins on the uniforms would be likely illegal.

Also, Soldiers are a completely different case because they are not employees. Soldiers are under the UMCJ and the constitution doesn't apply to them the same way it does to us non-soldiers. They are technically institutionalized in the same way as a patient in a psych ward.

I'll take "irrelevant examples" for $100, Alex. =)

No, the military (and to a much lesser extent other government employees) is exempt from a lot of 1st amendment rules that civilians are protected by.

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