I was pretty dismayed that Gwynne Shotwell's actions were so blatantly egregious. I'd expect something like that (or probably worse) from Musk, but my view of Shotwell was that she was always "the adult in the room" at SpaceX. So a bit sad to see that she didn't even realize the illegality of her actions (as other comments mentioned, all her actions were clearly put in writing).
The NLRB only collects tens of millions in fines, nationwide, per year [0]. Shotwell probably understood the illegality of her actions quite well—and more importantly understood that the benefits of chilling labor activism in a 30k-employee company far outweighed the miniscule costs.
In support of this: Shotwell not only fired these employees, but made a loud spectacle out of it—emailing the entire company to announce their firing. This, deterrence, was the reason.
Keep in mind she answers to Musk, you can't assume she had the leeway in this instance, especially since he likely got a bee in his bonnet about it and took an uncompromising position.
She also answers to the laws of the society she lives in, which supersede and contractual obligations (or, rather, nullify them).
I've read a book or two that interview/discuss-what the elderly and what regrets they've had about their life: one of the common ones is that they didn't live their life with as much as integrity as they'd like to.
It's an incredible reminder to people that HR are not there for the staff. I sometimes forget myself but it's one of the most plain scams in the workforce.
Speaking up against your employer should not threaten your job. That's how you get an echo chamber of horrible decisions made by the people who just so happen to sit at the top. Especially in a company run by someone who claims to "seek truths" like Musk.
However, it certainly would not make you popular with the true believers in the room. You would definitely feel the discontent amongst your peers in a conviction led company.
>Speaking up against your employer should not threaten your job.
if you mean this as advice, ok, but if you mean it as "this needs to be a law", what are you even talking about, authoritarian much?
>That's how you get an echo chamber of horrible decisions made by the people who just so happen to sit at the top.
firing employees for speaking out might get you, the employer, an echo chamber, but perhaps for your product an echo chamber is the business strategy you chose. Steve Jobs was famous for his attention to detail, reinforcing and staying on message, "hold it up just this way, show everybody, look how thin it is! echo that or don't work here." Freedom needs to include the freedom to set a strategy and stick to it, and if setting the strategy is not your job but your dream, find that job for yourself, don't think you should get paid to undermine it for somebody else.
Circulating an open letter point-blank criticizing the CEO is absolutely unprofessional and I'm honestly shocked anyone here thinks they could pull this crap without getting fired.
That's the opposite of meritocracy. And abuse of power on your bosses part. Don't know why so many in this thread seems to support obviously corrupt behavior.
Is it? If I have serious on-going disagreements with my CEO's strategy and tactics to lead the company and I choose to take those disagreements public in a scorched earth style, I fully expect that I'd get sacked for it. And I think I should be (presumably with the typical severance for a other-than-cause termination).
I'm standing here thinking "yup, that's about right" and other posters are thinking this is "so not right as to be obviously corrupt".
Abuse of power is a relative term. If something is the norm, then doing it is not abuse. It's fine in most companies to complain about the boss to HR or to the boss themselves, but not fine to complain it to someone else.
If I had bad boss who isn't doing anything illegal or breaks company's policy, I would likely switch my job rather than taking the impossible task of fixing them if they don't want to fix themselves.
Human relationships are not that cold. It is against human nature. Sure acting human may be suboptimal from a business sense, but there should not be a surprise when a human acts human.
how are they able to prove this in court though? surely the HR wouldn't be that stupid to document the reason of firing is "criticising the CEO".
also, not trying to be on Musk side, of course he has made some embarrassing and stupid tweets. But if you created a letter that your CEO's public comment is "frequent source of embarrassment", won't you get fired in any other company??
in meta, someone even got fired for being a youtuber, criticising the CEO and spreading the letter is worse right??
- "7. About June 15, 2022, Respondent, by Gwynne Shotwell, through an email
unlawfully restricted employees from distributing the Open Letter."
- "11. About June 16, 2022, Respondent, by Gwynne Shotwell, in an email to all
employees announced that employees had been discharged for their involvement in the Open
Letter."
Shotwell literally wrote an email telling them they had to stop discussing the issue or she would consider it insubordination then fired them the next day. No need for HR to do anything when the person in charge is incriminating themselves.
I mean, in many cases that’s grounds for dismissal and legitimately the job of a manager.
“Yo, stop bringing politics to work, your job is to make flight controls - not criticize the owners of the company outside of work. You’re being disruptive - stop.”
Idk, Musks behavior is what it is, idk why these employees thought it was their role within the company to continue to speak out.
Perhaps it’s a “obviousness of the coincidence“ kind of thing where if these people had nothing against them in their files and just suddenly got fired very very shortly after criticizing leadership it counts?
That said as history has shown over and over I would not put it past people doing illegal things to document the illegal things they are doing.
I'm not up on US employment law. As an employee are you entitled to put out a letter saying your CEO is a jerk and that the idiot isn't allowed to fire you so you'll keeping saying it?
8 out of 13,000 employees wanted to circulate a letter complaining about Musk's tweets and the Labor board claims they were "illegally" fired over this. Which law specifically requires employers to permit every employee to spam the company with their personal grievances? This isn't union organization or whistleblowing. They could use a little more detail on how and why they believe this firing is illegal.
I spent about fifteen minutes poking around. I'm not sure, but I take the impression this is in fact protected organizing, at least according to the NLRB. It seems like this is seen by NLRB as workers expressing concern and advocating for better working conditions (eg free of Musk's distractions), and the company retaliating against them. (To be clear, I have no idea whether the case has merit or not, my only claim is that NLRB seems to think so.)
I tried to find the particular case; according to Reuters' initial coverage (linked in the above article) these charges were filed November 2022, but I couldn't find one from that time on the NLRB website.
A group of employees asking their employer not to joke about sexual harassment is protected concerted activity. That is why it was illegal retaliation to fire them
>You have the right to act with co-workers to address work-related issues
How do Musk’s personal statements/opinions outside of work count as work-related issues?
Genuinely asking, I don’t understand how these rules are enforced.
Apple has locked down internal communications about non work-related topics on internal slack and email in the wake of RTO discussions. If this is grounds for a lawsuit, I think other companies are probably open to these kinds of lawsuits too.
Does anyone know where these employees were employed? I’m a worker in a right-to-work state and would love it if this set a precedent for icing out employers from retribution style separations.
This is being enforced by the NLRB which, as far as I understand, only enforces federal labor laws. So it should not matter what state you're in as far as having similar protection goes.
That's not what right-to-work means. Right to work was invented by conservatives to give employees the "right" to not pay dues to a union that represents employees at the company.
It's just one of the many ways employers have managed to weaken unions in the US over the last half-plus century.
I think they meant that since they are in a right to work state having something like this to show that that doesn’t automatically mean you can be pushed around would be a good thing.
I'm very socialist but I kinda agree with this. Often the unions here in the Netherlands are too entangled with the company's management and don't actually represent my interests. As such I don't pay them (and their ridiculously overpaid CEOs).
Unfortunately in the last 30 years the grassroots unions got corrupted by big business when the left (red) and right (green) parties worked together (we called it the "purple" cabinets). And the union leaders became entangled into the business cultures, also known as the "polder model". They basically made underhanded deals and cashed out. Our prime minister at the time himself started out on the barricades with a megaphone and ended up in luxury commisary appointments. Most unions are a joke now, just corporate puppets. I don't want to pay for their puppet show :P
The left-wing party got severely punished for this betrayal and is only on its way back into the political scene 20 years later, but unfortunately they left a vacuum which meant the country has deteriorated a lot (to the point of the extreme-right winning the last election).
Readit News
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/03/business/spacex-elon-musk...
In support of this: Shotwell not only fired these employees, but made a loud spectacle out of it—emailing the entire company to announce their firing. This, deterrence, was the reason.
[0] https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/the-nlrb-recov...
She also answers to the laws of the society she lives in, which supersede and contractual obligations (or, rather, nullify them).
I've read a book or two that interview/discuss-what the elderly and what regrets they've had about their life: one of the common ones is that they didn't live their life with as much as integrity as they'd like to.
Deleted Comment
However, it certainly would not make you popular with the true believers in the room. You would definitely feel the discontent amongst your peers in a conviction led company.
if you mean this as advice, ok, but if you mean it as "this needs to be a law", what are you even talking about, authoritarian much?
>That's how you get an echo chamber of horrible decisions made by the people who just so happen to sit at the top.
firing employees for speaking out might get you, the employer, an echo chamber, but perhaps for your product an echo chamber is the business strategy you chose. Steve Jobs was famous for his attention to detail, reinforcing and staying on message, "hold it up just this way, show everybody, look how thin it is! echo that or don't work here." Freedom needs to include the freedom to set a strategy and stick to it, and if setting the strategy is not your job but your dream, find that job for yourself, don't think you should get paid to undermine it for somebody else.
I'm standing here thinking "yup, that's about right" and other posters are thinking this is "so not right as to be obviously corrupt".
If I had bad boss who isn't doing anything illegal or breaks company's policy, I would likely switch my job rather than taking the impossible task of fixing them if they don't want to fix themselves.
also, not trying to be on Musk side, of course he has made some embarrassing and stupid tweets. But if you created a letter that your CEO's public comment is "frequent source of embarrassment", won't you get fired in any other company??
in meta, someone even got fired for being a youtuber, criticising the CEO and spreading the letter is worse right??
- "7. About June 15, 2022, Respondent, by Gwynne Shotwell, through an email unlawfully restricted employees from distributing the Open Letter."
- "11. About June 16, 2022, Respondent, by Gwynne Shotwell, in an email to all employees announced that employees had been discharged for their involvement in the Open Letter."
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/CPT.3... (pdf)
“Yo, stop bringing politics to work, your job is to make flight controls - not criticize the owners of the company outside of work. You’re being disruptive - stop.”
Idk, Musks behavior is what it is, idk why these employees thought it was their role within the company to continue to speak out.
[edit - but in this case looks very much female]
That said as history has shown over and over I would not put it past people doing illegal things to document the illegal things they are doing.
I took that impression from here.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/spacex-illegally-fi...
I tried to find the particular case; according to Reuters' initial coverage (linked in the above article) these charges were filed November 2022, but I couldn't find one from that time on the NLRB website.
https://www.nlrb.gov/search/case/Tesla?sort=desc
As a side note - I don't know what a normal number of NLRB cases is for a large corporation, but this seems like a lot?
The case numbers are in the header of the document linked in this comment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38862605
The reason I didn't find the case was I spaced out and looked for Tesla instead of SpaceX, d'oh.
It doesn't say anything about controlling your employers speech on their personal social media accounts.
How do Musk’s personal statements/opinions outside of work count as work-related issues?
Genuinely asking, I don’t understand how these rules are enforced.
Apple has locked down internal communications about non work-related topics on internal slack and email in the wake of RTO discussions. If this is grounds for a lawsuit, I think other companies are probably open to these kinds of lawsuits too.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
It's just one of the many ways employers have managed to weaken unions in the US over the last half-plus century.
Unfortunately in the last 30 years the grassroots unions got corrupted by big business when the left (red) and right (green) parties worked together (we called it the "purple" cabinets). And the union leaders became entangled into the business cultures, also known as the "polder model". They basically made underhanded deals and cashed out. Our prime minister at the time himself started out on the barricades with a megaphone and ended up in luxury commisary appointments. Most unions are a joke now, just corporate puppets. I don't want to pay for their puppet show :P
The left-wing party got severely punished for this betrayal and is only on its way back into the political scene 20 years later, but unfortunately they left a vacuum which meant the country has deteriorated a lot (to the point of the extreme-right winning the last election).