The National Labor Relations Board on Monday said it was illegal for Tesla to ban employees from wearing union-insignia T-shirts, ruling in a 2017 dispute between the electric car maker and the United Auto Workers union.
NLRB President Lauren McFerran said the ruling reaffirms that “any attempt to restrict the use of clothing or union insignia is presumably illegal and — consistent with Supreme Court precedent — an employer has a greater burden to justify attempts to limit this important right”.
In a 3-2 decision, the NLRB said that when companies interfere with employees’ rights to display union insignia, the employer “has the burden of establishing special circumstances” and the majority “found that Tesla failed to establish special circumstances in this case.” case”.
Tesla did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The UAW praised the decision on Tuesday (30). “This is a huge victory for workers who have the courage to come together and organize in a system that is currently heavily in favor of employers like Tesla, who have no qualms about breaking the law,” said the vice president of UAW, Cindy Estrada, in a statement.
“While we celebrate the fairness in today’s ruling by an increasingly pro-worker NLRB, it also highlights substantial flaws in US labor law. Here is a company that has clearly taken a number of aggressive and illegal steps to block workers’ rights, and yet it’s still more than four years before workers see a modicum of justice.”
In addition to ruling on the Tesla case, the NLRB also reversed a 2019 agency decision involving Walmart Inc, saying the earlier decision “ignored decades of board precedent.”
The NLRB’s earlier ruling had said that Walmart’s rationale for restricting union insignia in the sales floor to improve the customer shopping experience and prevent theft or vandalism was legitimate.
The NLRB in 2019, however, acknowledged possible interference with employees’ rights under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).
The 2019 decision set a precedent for employers across the country to have more control over limiting union attire.
Walmart did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The NLRB said some Tesla employees who assemble electric vehicles at its Fremont, California plant wore T-shirts with union logos during a 2017 UAW union organizing campaign.
At that time, the UAW sought to represent workers at Tesla’s Fremont facilities, who are not unionized.
Tesla’s “team wear” policy required employees to wear black shirts printed with the Tesla logo or their own black shirts without a logo.
The NLRB found that this implicitly prohibited employees from replacing any shirt with a logo or emblem, including a shirt with the union’s insignia.
The NLRB said that prior to 2017, Tesla production employees regularly wore shirts that were not black or had unrelated Tesla logos and emblems.
On Monday, it ordered Tesla to rescind its policy banning employees from wearing black union shirts.
This is not the first clash between Tesla and the NLRB.
In 2021, the NLRB said that a 2018 tweet by CEO Elon Musk, in which he threatened that Tesla employees who form a union would lose their stock options, was illegal and should be deleted.
Source: CNN Brasil
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