SpaceX illegally fired workers critical of Elon Musk, US labor agency says

It's a seemingly never-ending scandal that in the United States the remedy for infringing on workers' rights to take collective action is a notice posting ("[management] won't infringe on your rights again") or a make-whole order ("you will get back pay and reinstatement months or years after being fired in retaliation").

Firms won't change their behavior until they face stiff financial penalties, much as they would for violating the rights of investors or other property owners. The vast majority of people live through wage work; their rights shouldn't take a back seat to those of the owning classes.

I dare anyone today to send a note saying their CEO is a distraction and embarrassment and see how far you get.

ITT: Americans realizing that even they have the tiniest bit of rights under US labor laws.

It should be a pretty obvious that there is strong correlation between employee dissatisfaction and employee performance, so a lot of these situations can be pretty noisy he-said/she-said cases. A lot of people can be publicly critical of a CEO, and the subset of those who get fired for performance reasons can have reason to complain about it being retaliatory.

But let's be real here. This is Elon Musk. There's probably an obvious paper trail. And anyone who is actually being terminated for performance at a large company should be on a PIP (performance improvement plan) long before they are terminable, so it would be obvious to all involved that it was not retaliatory.

Okay, but at what company wouldn't that get you fired?