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Comment by NelsonMinar | Hacker News Reader

Tesla has a pattern of breaking labor laws, partiuclarly when it comes to union organizing. Wikipedia has a list but only of resolved cases that are a couple years old or more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/25/business/musk-labor-board...

Here's Tesla firing an employee for union organizing, which is illegal. Guest appearance by a Musk tweet which was also illegal: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/25/business/musk-labor-board...

Recently Tesla tried to ban pro-union t-shirts. That was illegal. (Also a bit hard to square with Musk's supposed free speech stand.) https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/29/tesla-ban-on-pro-union-shirt...

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> Tesla tried to ban pro-union t-shirts.

That's a misleading way of putting it. It makes it sound like they said "you can wear whatever shirt you want except for pro-union ones", but what they really said was basically "you have to wear our uniform shirt".

That's a misleading way of putting it. Tesla said "you have to wear our uniform shirt [because you started wearing pro-union shirts]" and the NLRB told them to get stuffed.

I included the wrong link for Wikipedia and can no longer edit my comment. It's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lawsuits_involving_Tes...

It's not like the NLRB is some paragon of virtue.

Care to elaborate for those of us who aren’t aware of what you’re talking about?

I bet lots of large (and small) companies have a similar pattern. This was in a single location during a two month period. It could be Tesla as a whole or it could be one dumbass manager.

So much about this post and the article are misleading.

The shirt one was a ruling that was previously undecided. It is not like Tesla did something that was explicitly against the law; they were just ruled against. But the way this ruling has been described makes it sound like they are the evil Empire.

Why in 2023 do people continue to treat Tesla with kid gloves? One dumbass manager? Companies are merely collections of people, money, IP, and organisational inertia. How is “one dumbass manager” any sort of mitigation? We are fully within our rights to attribute the actions of an employee at a company, in service of their employment at said company, to the company itself. Unless of course this is all implicitly about defending the reputation of Elon Musk, which itself is cringeworthy.

It's pretty obvious that someone threatening the profits of major car manufacturers, gasoline producers, aerospace contractors, and Russia is going to get dragged in the media. The article was sparse on actual details. I'm pro union but that doesn't make UAW awesome or a bunch of angels. I never see the same amount of outrage for the companies that fought EVs, better gas mileage, and every safety feature ever introduced. Hyundai had an Alabama subsidiary that was caught with foreign 13 and 14 year olds working there and we hardly hear a peep. Spare me the "Tesla is the great evil" BS. Any company of its size will have similar issues.

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