Tesla workers at the company’s Buffalo Gigafactory have filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), accusing Twitter of “shadowing” their newly created union account, according to Vice News. The group announced their intention to unionize on February 14 – they even published one public comment on Twitter about “I’m looking for a voice at work”. However, the group’s tweets disappeared from search results the next day, indicating their account was shadow-banned.
“In February 2023, immediately after workers announced a union campaign at the Tesla Gigafactory 2, the aforementioned employer, through CEO Elon Musk and/or his agents and representatives, caused the union’s Twitter account (@united_tesla) to be suspended from the Twitter platform,” the group said in an NLRB filing from Workers United, the union supporting the campaign.
We have confirmed that a search for “united_tesla” or “TeslaWorkersUnited” does not return tweets posted by the account itself. Normally, searching for a user will show their tweets, but using these search terms you’ll only see results that tag the group or mention their name. A group spokesperson told Vice News that they conducted a shadowban test and found that their account “had been flagged as ‘search suggestion blocked’ on one platform [their] employer belongs.”
Tesla boss Elon Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion last year, is considered a staunch union critic. In 2018, he tweeted that nothing was stopping Tesla workers from joining a union in response to someone asking about reports that the company had anti-union management. However, he also asked: “[W]hy pay union dues [and] Give up stock options for nothing[?]The NLRB ruled that the tweet violated labor laws and considered it a threat that employees would forfeit company-paid stock options if they unionized. It also urged Musk to delete his tweet, which he has yet to do, as Tesla is currently appealing the employment agency’s decision.
The people behind this particular campaign are responsible for labeling data from Tesla’s Autopilot technology. They previously told Bloomberg that not only are they asking the company for better pay, but also for better working conditions. Workers said Tesla monitors their keystrokes to determine how much time they spend on each task and that they’ve had to skip bathroom breaks as a result. They also accused the company of unlawfully firing employees “in retaliation for … and to discourage union activity.”
In a blog post, Tesla said that was a “false claim” and that the terminated Autopilot employees were underperformers. It said the company conducts performance reviews every six months and the workers concerned had not shown “sufficient improvement” despite the feedback received. In addition, the company said it had identified the employees it would lay off on February 3, well before the group announced it planned to unionize. The automaker also said it’s only implementing time tracking “to calculate how long it takes to caption an image,” so “there’s nothing to be gained by delaying bathroom breaks.”
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