2 former Tesla employees say company illegally fired them for criticizing Elon Musk

By Cindi Cook

DETROIT, Michigan (AA) - Two former employees of electric car maker Tesla have filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board claiming they were illegally fired for criticizing Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk.

In the complaint filed Dec. 15, the California-based employees said they were involved in drafting two letters, one of which asked Tesla to reconsider its post-COVID return to the office policies and the other which pointed to a post by Musk on Twitter that they claim is in violation of the company’s anti-harassment policies.

According to reporting by Bloomberg, the employees, who are not identified in the complaint and have so far remained anonymous, were accused of having drafted letters critical of the company.

The text of the complaint cites that Tesla, Inc. violated specific sections and subsections of the National Labor Relations Act but says in greater detail that Tesla “retaliated against the employees for engaging in the protected concerted activity of discussing their working conditions.”

The complaint goes on to say that the company applied its policies in a “disparate manner,” thus terminating the two employees “to prevent other workers from speaking up regarding their workplace rights.”

“Tesla terminated Employee A on June 17, 2022, falsely characterizing their organizing of employee discussions on these topics as an attack on Tesla,” the complaint said.

The other employee was fired days before for “false and unsubstantiated performance reasons,” according to reporting on the matter. That employee however had received a performance-based raise just one month earlier.

The formal grievance says that “Employee A is filing anonymously through their attorneys to protect themselves from public harassment/doxing.”

According to the reporting, central to the workers’ grievances with Musk was his hard and fast policy of requiring employees to return to the office full time in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic or risking possible termination as well as the alleged failure of the company to enforce an anti-harassment policy.

The complaint is signed by two lawyers, Anna B. Shaver of the law firm Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, LLP, and Laurie Burgess of Burgess Law Offices P.C., both of which operate out of San Francisco.

The attorneys also represented eight former employees of SpaceX, Musk’s sister company engaged in space exploration and rocket development. The employees had also filed complaints with the National Labor Relations Board over firings allegedly for criticizing Musk and for urging executives to make the firm’s culture more inclusive.