Tesla Fired Dozens of Autopilot Workers the Day After a Union Drive Started

Tesla workers at a plant in Buffalo announced a union drive on Tuesday. On Wednesday, more than 30 of them were fired, including an organizing committee member, in what some workers are calling explicit retaliation intended to crush the nascent union campaign. 

And an organizer at the plant, which employs more than 800 Autopilot analysts at Tesla, says there’s fear that dozens more workers could be fired by the end of the week. 

Fired workers reportedly filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board, according to Bloomberg, which first reported the firings late Wednesday. The employees said in the filing that the firings were “in retaliation for union activity and to discourage union activity,” and asked for a federal court intervention to reinstate the fired workers, Bloomberg reported. 

Alexandra Kowalewski, a data analyst who has worked at the Buffalo factory for more than a year, said management had said the firings were based on performance. But employees had previously been told by management that those reviews, based on July through December 2022, would come out in March. 

“It is very suspicious that it was ahead of schedule,” Kowalewski told VICE News. “Frankly, things are never ahead of schedule at Tesla.”

Arian Berek, a member of the organizing committee, said she was “blindsided” by her firing Wednesday, because she had recently been told she was performing above expectations. 

“I got COVID and was out of the office, then I had to take a bereavement leave,” Berek said in a statement. “I returned to work, was told I was exceeding expectations and then Wednesday came along. I strongly feel this is in retaliation to the committee announcement and it’s shameful.”

Tesla disbanded its public relations team in 2020. An email from VICE News seeking comment from Tesla bounced back and said that the “recipient’s mailbox is full and can’t accept messages now.”  

On Thursday night, Tesla published a statement on its website describing the allegation of retaliatory firings as “false,” saying the terminations were performance-based and that the decision had been made to fire the employees on Feb. 3. 

“We learned in hindsight that one out of the 27 impacted employees officially identified as part of the union campaign,” Tesla said. “This exercise pre-dated any union campaign.”

Do you have information or tips about labor conditions/retaliation at Tesla or another workplace? You can contact Paul Blest by email at paul.blest@vice.com or at (919) 330-0761.

There are rampant rumors at the plant that more firings could come by the end of this week, Kowalewski said. “Everybody in the office is nervous,” she told VICE News. “It’s an edgy atmosphere, and not a good kind. It’s nervewracking."

Previous efforts to form a union at Tesla, including an attempt by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and United Steelworkers at the same Buffalo factory in 2018 and 2019, have not been successful. CEO Elon Musk, who now owns Twitter and fired that company’s unionized janitors last year, dared the United Autoworkers in March 2022 to organize a Tesla plant, saying he would “do nothing to stop them.”

But that’s not how Musk has responded to potential unionization in the past. Tesla once banned United Autoworkers shirts at its factory in Fremont, California, a move the NLRB ruled last year was an illegal violation of employees’ rights. Musk tweeted in 2018 that employees who unionized would be forced to “give up stock options,” which the NLRB said in 2021 was an illegal attempt to “coercively threaten” employees against unionizing. The tweet is still up.

The new effort in Buffalo is backed by Workers United, the group that’s aided Starbucks employees in a wildly successfully organizing drive that has seen the unionization of employees at more than 250 stores (as well as complaints of systemic retaliation against organizers). 

Kowalewski said that the Tesla workers seeking to form a union want better job security and working conditions, and that a lack of those things has led to high turnover rates at the factory. Starting pay for analysts is around $19 an hour. 

Some employees told Bloomberg that the company’s practice of tracking keystrokes to see how much time employees spend working has led some to avoid taking bathroom breaks. 

“When you first start, you’re like, ‘Oh, this is a cool job and exciting opportunity,’” she told VICE News. “But then you start to realize it’s a job that expects you to be almost robotic in a way. You’re not really valued as a human.” 

Kowalewski told VICE News that “many” of the fired employees were pro-union, and Wednesday’s events have remaining workers worried that they could be next. She said while some people are “way more interested” in unionizing after the firings, others have quickly lost interest in the union. 

“We want to leave it up to the NLRB to investigate, and if it is all completely above board, that’s what it is,” Kowalewski told VICE News. “But at the moment it just doesn't seem like that.”

This story has been updated with a statement from Tesla. 

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