On the menu today: Sure, I could showcase and echo the message from Nikki Haley to Donald Trump — “quit whining!” — but you’ve already read that this week. So instead, here’s a look at the United Auto Workers filing a complaint against Elon Musk; the new incoming CEO of Starbucks, Brian Niccol, and why the lefties hate him; and the high prospect for worker strikes becoming more common under a Kamala Harris presidency.
Brian Niccol, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and the Future of American Labor Strikes
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, during his two-hour conversation with Elon Musk Monday night:
Well, you, you’re the greatest cutter. I mean, I look at what you do. You walk in and you just 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 okay. You’re all gone. You’re all gone.” So, every one of you is gone and you are the greatest. You would be very good. Oh, you would love it.
Our David Zimmerman reports, “The United Auto Workers filed federal labor charges against former president Donald Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk for allegedly threatening and intimidating employees who go on strike.” Under the National Labor Relations Act, it is illegal to fire employees who strike or threaten to strike.
UAW president Shawn Fain’s released statement fumed:
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. 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.
It is worth noting that the United Auto Workers (UAW) want to unionize the employees of Musk’s electric-car company, Tesla. Fain was paid $228,872 as head of the UAW in 2023; the twelve “top officers are paid in excess of the [sic] $200,000 and hundreds more earn six figures, putting them in the top 5 percent of US income earners.” It is also worth noting that the “total dues-paying membership of the UAW fell by 13,000 last year to 370,000, down from 383,000 in 2022.” According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average autoworker is paid $30.78 per hour and works 41 hours per week, adding up to about $66,000 per year.
Fain has attended UAW events wearing an “EAT THE RICH” T-shirt. Good to know “the rich” starts at about $230,000 per year, and you can make about three-and-a-half times the salary of the people you represent and everything’s kosher.
(Actually, it’s not that kosher, because the United Auto Workers’ statement about the October 7 attacks called on “President Joe Biden and Congress to push for an immediate ceasefire and end to the siege of Gaza. We cannot bomb our way to peace.” Pal, you’re not going to persuade, cajole, or tickle the membership of Hamas out of their vicious desire to rape, torture, and kill every Jew they can find. I wonder how many UAW members think their union should have its own foreign-policy stance.)
In November 2023, at a New York Times DealBook Summit, Musk laid out his belief that unions are inherently divisive and create friction and tension within a company:
I think it is generally not good to have an adversarial relationship between people in line — one group at the company and another group. In fact, I — I disagree with the idea of unions for the reason that it is different than people may expect, which is I just don’t like anything which creates kind of a “lords and peasants” sort of thing. I think the unions try to create negativity in a company and try to create a “lords and peasants” situation.
There are many people at Tesla that have gone from working on the line to being in senior management. There is no “lords and peasants.” Everyone eats at the same table. Everyone parks in the same parking lot. At GM, there is a special elevator only for senior executives. We have no such thing at Tesla. I actually know the people on the line, because I worked on the line. And I slept in the factory, and I worked beside them. So I’m no stranger to them.
Actually, there are many times where I said, “Can’t we just hold a union vote?” But apparently a company isn’t allowed to hold a union vote. The unions can’t do it. I said, let’s just have them hold a vote and see what happens.
The other big business news this morning is that Starbucks announced that starting in September, Brian Niccol will become the coffee chain’s new chairman and CEO. Niccol currently serves as chairman and CEO of Chipotle.
There are more than 17,000 Starbucks cafes in the United States. The company ranks 116th in the Fortune 500, is the world’s largest coffee chain by sales, and to quote an old Dennis Miller joke, “This week I saw in my neighborhood that they’re opening a new Starbucks . . . in an old Starbucks.”
In the eyes of the Left, Niccol and the Chipotle corporate leaders are union-busters, and the Biden administration’s National Labor Relations Board concurs. In April 2023, the NRLB announced a settlement agreement with Chipotle:
After employees filed a union petition with the NLRB, Chipotle unlawfully closed its Augusta store and terminated staff on the day the NLRB hearing on the petition was scheduled to commence. On November 3, 2022, Regional Director Sacks issued a complaint on the charges and on March 24, 2023, she approved a settlement agreement.
Under the settlement agreement, Chipotle will provide $240,000 in backpay and front pay to 24 employees, offer preferential hiring to these employees for any Chipotle job opening in Maine, and post a Notice advising employees of their NLRA rights at 40 stores throughout Chipotle’s Northern New England Sub-Region.
Lefties also don’t like Niccol because in 2021, he revealed that the Chipotle chain raised its menu prices by 3.5 to 4 percent to offset the costs of its minimum-wage increases:
“It made sense in this scenario to invest in our employees and get these restaurants staffed and make sure that we have the pipeline of people to support our growth,” Chipotle CEO Brian Niccol said at the conference. “And then with that, we’ve taken some pricing to cover some of that investment.”
In the eyes of the Left, government-mandated wage increases must never be connected to consumers paying higher prices.
The Biden years have seen a steady increase in the number of strikes, particularly last year; “Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) show that 458,900 workers were involved in ‘major work stoppages’ in 2023. The number of workers involved in major work stoppages increased by 280 percent in 2023.”
We can argue about whether Joe Biden and his team want to see more worker strikes happen, but it is clear that the Biden administration wants — and a Kamala Harris administration, if it came to pass, would want —unions to have as much leverage as possible and to force corporate management to make as many concessions as possible. As I wrote in September:
President Biden likes to boast he’s the most pro-union president in American history. Whether Biden wanted this or not, this means he’s also becoming the most pro-strike president in American history. When the man behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office keeps bragging that he has your back, you probably feel like you’ve got extra leverage in a dispute. The result is that the country is not only experiencing a Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strike, it is experiencing the biggest strike by the United Auto Workers in years, and smaller strikes by various unions of hotel workers and nurses. There are rumbles of regional strikes by the Service Employees International Union and the Association of Professional Flight Attendants.
Meanwhile, as Musk alluded to, there’s considerable evidence that at a lot of workplaces, workers don’t want to join a union. Many workers aren’t convinced they get their money’s worth for their dues, they don’t intend to spend the rest of their careers in their current job, and they have faith in their own abilities to negotiate a better deal with management.
Earlier this year, our Dominic Pino noted:
Efforts to unionize Starbucks have been the focus of years of progressive activism. Judging by media coverage, you might think coffee-shop workers are also very enthusiastic about unionizing, and that their enthusiasm might be representative of a larger trend toward organized labor in the U.S. . . .
Wanting out of a coffee-shop union has happened elsewhere. In 2023, Starbucks workers in New York City, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Bloomington, Minn., Salt Lake City, Oklahoma City, and Greenville, S.C., also sought help from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation to decertify Workers United unions.
The Democrats’ presumptive vice-presidential nominee, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, chose for his first solo campaign event the convention of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), one of the country’s largest public-sector unions. From now until Election Day, Harris and Walz will tell every major and minor union in the country, “We’ve got your back,” which many unions will interpret as a green light to make the largest demands possible and then go on strike.
In other words, a vote for Harris is likely a vote for additional strikes in the years to come.
ADDENDUM: Another excerpt from Trump’s chat with Musk that I think is unintentionally revealing:
Yeah, by the way, congratulations. I just looked at the number of people that are listening to you and I chat. We’ll call it a chat, but congratulations. This is very good. I mean, it’s great. And you’re an interesting character. You know the new head of a place called Argentina and he was, he’s a big, you know, he’s great. And he’s a big MAGA fan. You know that he ran on MAGA. And he took it to an extreme too. He ran on MAGA and I hear he’s doing really a terrific job. It’s called Make Argentina Great Again. It worked out perfectly. He came in, they bought a lot of hats he brought over, but he’s doing a big job. He really cut. And I’m hearing they’re starting to do pretty well. Inflation’s getting down. You know, they had like 2,000 percent. They had inflation, like not normal inflation. They had the real deal. But we’re gonna have that pretty soon. I think we have the worst inflation we’ve had in 100 years. They say it’s 48 years. I don’t believe it. I think we have the worst. They don’t include a lot of the items that should be included, you know?
Now, the name “Javier Milei” is not exactly common in the U.S. news cycle, but it’s not exactly rare, either.
Throw in Trump’s use of “your new governor from Minnesota” and “the Minnesota gentleman” when referring to Tim Walz, and “the governor previous, the former governor,” and “previous to Glenn, the governor,” when referring to Ralph Northam, and I think it is clear that the 78-year-old Trump just can’t remember names as well as he used to.