Elon Musk Invites UAW to Hold Union Vote at Tesla

Tesla Inc. TSLA 1.80% Chief Executive Elon Musk said he was open to the United Auto Workers union holding a vote about organizing labor at the company after long resisting such a move.

“Our real challenge is Bay Area has negative unemployment, so if we don’t treat and compensate our (awesome) people well, they have many other offers and will just leave!” Mr. Musk said via Twitter late Wednesday. “I’d like hereby to invite UAW to hold a union vote at their convenience. Tesla will do nothing to stop them,” he said.

The UAW had no immediate comment.

Workers for Tesla, America’s largest car company by value, aren’t currently unionized. Some employees at the company’s plant in Fremont, Calif., sought to organize several years ago with the help of the United Auto Workers union. Tesla took steps to hinder that effort, including “coercively interrogating” employees and threatening them with the loss of stock options, moves that violated U.S. labor law, the National Labor Relations Board ruled. The board ordered Mr. Musk to delete a tweet that discouraged unionization, among other remedies. The electric-vehicle maker has appealed the board’s decision.

Tesla’s lack of worker labor unionization has left the electric-vehicle maker as somewhat of an outcast as the Biden administration pushes to get Americans to embrace such vehicles. President Biden snubbed Tesla in an August White House meeting on electric vehicles with UAW officials and executives from Ford, GM and Stellantis, which count EVs as a fraction of their overall sales. In this week’s State of the Union address, Mr. Biden mentioned Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co. for their investments in electric vehicles. Tesla, which produces more of those vehicles, wasn’t mentioned.

Mr. Musk at times has taken aim at the president. “Biden is a UAW sock puppet,” the Tesla boss tweeted in October, using an emoji to indicate socks.

The billionaire in December also came out against a signature Biden administration legislative proposal, criticizing federal efforts meant to spur electric-vehicle adoption, including a bill that would boost incentives for buying battery-powered cars.

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The emergence of a generation of electric-vehicle startups introduces new challenges for U.S. organized labor, which has seen auto-sector membership decline in recent decades.

“Tesla factory worker compensation is the highest in the auto industry,” Mr. Musk has said. He has taken aim at the UAW on several occasions on Twitter.

Tesla also is facing other labor issues. A California regulatory agency has sued the company for alleged racial discrimination and harassment, saying the electric-vehicle maker turned a blind eye to years of complaints from Black factory workers.

The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing’s complaint filed last month targets alleged workplace issues at Tesla’s principal U.S. car plant, located in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Tesla also produces cars in Shanghai, where workers aren’t unionized.

Write to William Boston at [email protected] and Rebecca Elliott at [email protected]