Former president Donald Trump chortled at the idea of firing striking workers in an online interview with Elon Musk. Musk, the world’s richest man, has ferociously fought unionization at his car company Tesla. Musk also bought the social media company Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X. Last month he endorsed Trump’s 2024 campaign for president, and on Aug. 12 he hosted the former president for a live conversation on X.com that lasted two hours. At one point in the interview, Trump seemed to praise Musk for his resistance to unions.
“They go on strike and you say, ‘that’s okay, you’re all gone … every one of you is gone,’” Trump said. Both men laugh as he says this.
United Auto Workers (UAW), which has been trying to help Tesla workers unionize, seized on that comment, filing a charge the next day with the National Labor Relations Board saying it was an attempt to threaten and intimidate workers who engage in striking, which is a protected activity under federal labor law.
UAW also posted an audio clip of the comment — on Musk’s own platform — and within 12 hours it had over a million views.
“Both Trump and Musk want working class people to sit down and shut up, and they laugh about it openly,” UAW president Shawn Fain said in a press statement. “It’s disgusting, illegal, and totally predictable from these two clowns.”
Trump is no fan of Fain either. On the final night of the Republican convention, Trump said Fain should be “fired immediately.” Fain, elected UAW president in March 2023, led UAW through a 46-day “stand-up strike” at the Big Three U.S. automakers that won reversal of decades of concessions. During the strike, Trump came to Michigan and spoke at a non-union auto parts plant, while Joe Biden became the first president in U.S. history to visit a strike picket line.
He's for the billionaires. Not for you.
— UAW (@UAW) August 13, 2024
Donald Trump is a scab. #StandUpUAW pic.twitter.com/hj10zDPbzw
