When Elon Musk appeared on the stage at The New York Times' DealBook Summit in November, columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin came prepared with a lot of questions. However, after Musk blew up the news—and his social media site—by telling advertisers to “go fuck yourself” when they ran away from his antisemitic statements, the rest of the interview was largely ignored.
That’s unfortunate because there were other things that Musk said that were at least as obnoxious as when he claimed people were trying to “blackmail” him by not spending money at X.
For example, when Sorkin asked about unions, Musk fired back that he disagreed with the whole idea of unions, declaring that it “creates a lords and peasants sort of thing.” The richest man in the world is not only wrong; he knows he’s wrong. It’s the lack of unions that turns workers into peasants. And it's the lords who have a reason to be frightened of what unions can do.
This past year has seen three astounding wins for unions in which workers achieved serious victories over executives who were attempting to destroy union power. First, the Writers Guild of America won an “exceptional” deal from studio bosses who started off trying to starve them into surrender. Right behind them came SAG-AFTRA, where actors and crew fought off the growing use of AI and digital images, as well as industry changes due to streaming, to reach a deal that gave the union both the pay and job protections it wanted. Then the United Auto Workers scored a huge victory over the “Big Three” U.S. manufacturers in October, making advances in compensation and employment security that were genuinely worth celebrating.
Sadly, while 2023 is a standout year for unions in recent history, it’s a year that stands out among many not-so-good years. Here’s how union membership in the United States has changed over the past several decades.
Union membership has been declining since the 1980s. This same period saw the rise of so-called “right-to-work” laws designed to erode union bargaining power and make organizing workers more difficult. However, the decline of unions has not generated the mythical bonus for workers that many companies imply in their anti-union rhetoric. The opposite has happened.
As union membership declined, more and more of the money at corporations was funneled away from the pockets of workers and directly into the vaults of executives. It’s not a matter of unions creating a “lords and peasants sort of thing.” It’s the lack of unions that turns every worker into a single, easily dismissed cog in the machine.
This relationship is an old one. When the Black Death swept across Europe in the 1300s, the loss of population made it difficult for feudal lords to maintain their territories. To secure their freedom, workers rapidly joined guilds. Those workers' guilds remained strong for more than two centuries, not only creating the middle class but also laying the stage for a little something called the Renaissance.
Workers responded the same way following the Great Depression. Organized labor led the way out of both the economic collapse and the first Gilded Age. Here’s one more graph, this time from the U.S. Treasury Department:
Is that clear enough? When workers have the power to organize, more money goes to workers and less piles up in the mansions of the ultra-rich. The destruction of unions that began in the 1960s and kicked into high gear under President Ronald Reagan is directly responsible for impoverishing workers and providing enormous sums to people like Musk.
In a world where union participation was high, there would be no Elon Musk. Not in the sense that he exists today. That doesn’t mean there would be no Tesla or no SpaceX. It just means that the workers at those companies would be participating in the wealth that’s been generated, rather than having all of it go to a man who bought Twitter so he could enable Nazis and bring more attention to his fart jokes.
Right now, Tesla is battling unions in Sweden who want to organize Tesla mechanics. That action has been joined by workers at many different unions, making it difficult for Tesla to import vehicles or to send license plates to Tesla owners. Those Swedish mechanics are also being supported by workers in Norway who are blockading Tesla vehicles and supplies. Danish dockworkers have signed on, refusing to unload shipments of Tesla’s cars.
These may seem like small countries, but they are important markets for Tesla. Norway and Sweden are both in the top five when it comes to the percentage of electric vehicles sold.
Musk is furious, and Tesla is trying to sue everyone. Even the Swedish postal system.
But the truth is Musk is also terrified. He’s terrified because after winning their fight with other U.S. automakers, UAW chiefs have made it clear they have a new target.
"To all the auto workers out there working without the benefits of a union, now it's your turn," UAW President Shawn Fain said in a video posted on a website urging auto workers to sign electronic cards seeking union representation.
Tesla recently managed to fight off an attempt to organize workers at a plant in Buffalo, New York, a plant where workers spend each day identifying items in images in an attempt to train Tesla’s recently recalled Autopilot system. But the National Labor Relations Board did cite Tesla for violations of rules, including actively soliciting grievances against workers trying to form a union. Musk’s long history of ignoring worker complaints includes leaving hundreds of injuries off official reports and firing workers who stayed home sick with COVID-19 even though the company had given those workers permission. It violated labor laws by preventing workers from discussing pay and benefits. And Musk has directly threatened workers that he would take away stock options if they unionized.
As The Guardian notes, it’s Musk who makes the workers at his companies miserable, not unions. Tesla workers do get those small stock options. But they are also paid $20 an hour less than union workers at Ford, GM, or Stellantis—and that was before the strike landed those union workers a 25% raise.
Workers at Tesla are undercompensated. Musk is overcompensated. The reason is that Musk keeps those nonunion workers in a position where they must negotiate one-on-one. It’s not so much lords and peasants as it is Godzilla and the people in the streets.
Musk has a right to be afraid. Because when workers unionize, the bosses of the Gilded Age lose. And the unions are coming for Elon Musk.
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It's our last episode of the year and we wanted to talk about what we are thankful for. It turns out that Republican disarray and ineptitude topped our list. Join us to count the ways!
