The United Auto Workers (UAW) filed federal labor charges against former president Donald Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk for allegedly threatening and intimidating employees who go on strike, the union announced Tuesday.
The pair’s comments stem from Monday night’s high-profile interview on X, during which Trump applauded the practice of terminating striking workers.
“I mean, I look at what you do,” Trump told Musk, referring to his mass layoffs of Twitter staff after he acquired the social-media company in 2022. “You walk in, you say, ‘You want to quit?’ They go on strike, I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK, you’re all gone. You’re all gone. So, every one of you is gone.’”
Musk, who endorsed Trump last month following the assassination attempt, laughed at his remarks without directly addressing them.
Nonetheless, the UAW takes issue with the interview’s participants for suggesting that union workers’ jobs can be terminated for their involvement in strikes. Under the National Labor Relations Act, it is illegal to fire employees who threaten to strike or engage in one.
“When we say Donald Trump is a scab, this is what we mean. When we say Trump stands against everything our union stands for, this is what we mean,” UAW president Shawn Fain said in a statement.
The union leader endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president late last month and has often criticized Trump for representing elite interests instead of the working class.
“Donald Trump will always side against workers standing up for themselves, and he will always side with billionaires like Elon Musk, who is contributing $45 million a month to a Super PAC to get him elected,” Fain continued. “Both Trump and Musk want working class people to sit down and shut up, and they laugh about it openly. It’s disgusting, illegal, and totally predictable from these two clowns.”
Fain has also butted heads with Musk over the UAW’s goal to unionize Tesla workers, which the owner of the electric-vehicle automaker wholeheartedly rejects. In November 2023, Musk said he disagreed “with the idea of unions.” But “if Tesla gets unionized, it’ll be because we deserve it and we failed in some way,” he noted.
The Trump-Musk X Spaces interview was dogged by technical difficulties for over 40 minutes, which Musk attributed to a denial-of-service, or DDoS, cyberattack. Over 1 million concurrent listeners tuned into the two-hour conversation between the billionaires Monday night. By early Tuesday, Musk claimed the interview pulled in a combined 1 billion views.
In a statement to Axios, Trump campaign senior adviser Brian Hughes called the UAW lawsuit “frivolous” and “a shameless political stunt intended to erode President Trump’s overwhelming support among America’s workers.”
Leading up to the election, Trump aims to gather support from the labor force. Notably, Teamsters has yet to endorse a presidential candidate this election cycle. Its leader indicated at last month’s Republican National Convention that the union’s endorsement is up for grabs. Trump’s union-busting comments this week, however, could potentially cost him the endorsement.
“Firing workers for organizing, striking, and exercising their rights as Americans is economic terrorism,” Teamsters president Sean O’Brien told NBC News on Tuesday in response to the Republican presidential nominee’s remarks.
The National Labor Relations Board will decide whether or not to investigate the labor charges made by the UAW. If the agency concludes there were violations, it could impose significant penalties on Trump and Musk.