Dive Brief:
- Tesla notified production workers they will receive a wage increase, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday.
- The raise covers all of Tesla’s U.S. production workers, material handlers and quality inspectors, according to a flyer posted at Tesla’s assembly plant in Fremont, California, viewed by Bloomberg.
- Tesla's decision to hike wages comes amid growing unionization efforts by non-unionized autoworkers in the U.S.
Dive Insight:
The automaker did not specify how much it would raise wages for production workers and did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Fremont assembly plant employs over 20,000 workers, according to Bloomberg. Hourly workers at Tesla are not represented by a union.
Tesla’s decision to raise wages comes after a number of major non-unionized automakers recently announced wage hikes for their workers in the U.S. following the UAW’s new contracts with the Big Three. Among them are Toyota, Hyundai, Honda, Subaru and Nissan. In November, Hyundai said it would raise wages 25% through 2028 for non-union production workers at its assembly plant in Alabama and EV factory in Georgia.
In December, Tesla announced it would raise wages by 10% for workers at its Nevada gigafactory, which produces batteries and other EV components. However, it's unclear if the raises were intended to stave off unionization efforts.
The UAW is now courting non-unionized workers to organize and join its ranks. But some of these efforts have met resistance, according to the UAW.
The UAW and some nonunion autoworkers accused management at Honda, Hyundai and Volkswagen of retaliating against employees' unionization efforts at U.S. plants. In December, the UAW and nonunion employees at Volkswagen’s assembly plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, filed an unfair labor practice complaint against the automaker following accusations of union-busting activities.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has also been publicly critical of unionization efforts, including most recently with union members in Sweden, where the company faces backlash for Musk’s anti-union stance.
In March 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed that Tesla illegally fired an employee in 2017 for unionization efforts at Tesla’s Fremont factory. Tesla was ordered to reinstate the employee with back pay.
At the New York Times DealBook Summit in November, Musk said on stage, “I disagree with the idea of unions.” Adding, “I just don’t like anything which creates kind of a lords and peasants sort of thing.”
