United Auto Workers files labor charge over Trump comments on strikes
The United Auto Workers labor union, which is trying to organize workers at Tesla, has filed a federal labor charge over comments Donald Trump made last night in his interview with Elon Musk.
The union, which has endorsed Kamala Harris’s bid for the White House, said this comment from Trump to Musk ran afoul of federal law against threatening to fire workers who go on strike: “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.’”
Here’s more, from UAW president Shawn Fain:
Donald Trump will always side against workers standing up for themselves, and he will always side with billionaires like Elon Musk, who is contributing $45m 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.
Key events
Joanna Walters
Wilma Liebman, chair of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) under former US president Barack Obama, said that the fact that Elon Musk chuckled but did not respond to Donald Trump’s comments about firing strike workers, during their online conversation last night, makes it harder for the NLRB to find the electric vehicle entrepreneur liable for making illegal threats to workers at his companies, Reuters reports.
Under federal law, workers cannot be fired for going on strike, and threatening to do so is illegal under the National Labor Relations Act, the UAW auto workers union said in a statement. Trump called Musk “the greatest cutter” for his swathing job losses.
The NLRB has limited power to punish unlawful labor practices. In cases involving illegal threats, the board can order employers to cease and desist from such conduct and to post notices in the workplace informing workers of their rights. Unions can also use favorable rulings from the NLRB to engage workers they are trying to organize.
It’s trying to expose more than anything politically what Donald Trump is about in terms of workers, and Musk as well. Everyone knows the NLRB remedies are toothless to start with, but it’s not so much for the remedy as for sending both a political message and an organizing message,” Liebman said.
The UAW has filed separate complaints against Musk and Trump with the NLRB.
‘Trump is a scab’ – union
Joanna Walters
The United Auto Workers union (UAW) leadership is going all in against Donald Trump for this presidential election.
In addition to the statement from the union president, Shawn Fain, the association has posted on X: “He’s for the billionaires. Not for you. Donald Trump is a scab.”
And, with a skeptical inquiring face emoji, the union re-posted a message from Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign X account, @KamalaHQ: “Trump praises billionaire Elon Musk for firing workers who were striking for better pay and working conditions.”
The UAW has endorsed Harris for president, as the presumptive Democratic nominee against Trump, the Republican nominee. It is also trying to unionize workers at Tesla, Musk’s electric vehicle company.
The day so far
Elon Musk is basking in the afterglow of the interview he conducted on X with Donald Trump last night. The Tesla CEO said their conversation had attracted 1bn views and comments, a number that was impossible to verify, while adding he would be willing to hold a similar event with Kamala Harris. But a remark Trump made during the interview about firing employees who strike has spurred the United Auto Workers to file a federal labor law complaint against both the former president and Musk, while Harris’s campaign dismissed last night’s event as a chat between “self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a live stream in the year 2024”.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
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Harris has no public events scheduled today, but her campaign continues to face questions over why the vice-president hasn’t held a press conference or granted a sit-down interview since announcing her bid for the White House.
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Musk has a long history of opposing unions, including at Tesla, where the UAW has been trying to encourage workers to organize.
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Trump has been flying around to campaign events in a plane once owned by Jeffrey Epstein, according to a report.
Kamala Harris, meanwhile, has no public events scheduled today, but continues to face questions over why she won’t talk to reporters.
The vice-president has not granted a proper interview or held a press conference since announcing her bid for the White House late last month, a decision her campaign spokeswoman Adrienne Elrod was asked about today, in an interview with CNN.
Elrod replied:
She has said on the campaign trail that she would be doing an interview at some point. She said that, I think, last week during – a during a rope line or when she was talking to reporters. But look, what is important here … is that she is taking her message directly to the American people. She hit a number of battleground states. I think we had 15,000 people in Detroit last week, 12,000 to 13,000 in Nevada. She’s been taking her message to the voters and drawing large crowds. So, she’s actually having those direct conversations.
Among those calling for Harris to talk to the press is the Guardian’s media columnist Margaret Sullivan. Here’s what she has to say:
As the Guardian’s Michael Sainato reported earlier this year, Elon Musk is part of a group of powerful business interests that have turned to the courts to blunt efforts to organize workers nationwide. Here’s more:
A multi-pronged legal attack under way by Elon Musk, large corporations, business groups and anti-union litigators threatens to “raise havoc” with US labor law and hobble a resurgent labor movement, according to experts.
So far efforts to scale back or undermine workers’ rights through the US courts have centered on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) – the US top workplace watchdog and overseer of union elections. But other laws – including trademark and property rights statutes – are also being used.
Both Musk and Starbucks are pursuing cases that would undermine the NLRB.
Musk’s company SpaceX filed a lawsuit championed by the Federalist Society and other conservative groups against the NLRB in January. The lawsuit claims the board is unconstitutional because its members can only be removed for cause, not at will, and claims the board violates due process protections. The suit was filed in Texas by Musk’s attorneys with the union avoidance law firm Morgan Lewis in response to a board complaint that SpaceX fired workers in retaliation for writing a letter over concerns about Musk’s behavior.
United Auto Workers files labor charge over Trump comments on strikes
The United Auto Workers labor union, which is trying to organize workers at Tesla, has filed a federal labor charge over comments Donald Trump made last night in his interview with Elon Musk.
The union, which has endorsed Kamala Harris’s bid for the White House, said this comment from Trump to Musk ran afoul of federal law against threatening to fire workers who go on strike: “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.’”
Here’s more, from UAW president Shawn Fain:
Donald Trump will always side against workers standing up for themselves, and he will always side with billionaires like Elon Musk, who is contributing $45m 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.
In addition to Elon Musk, Donald Trump was also a friend to the late convicted sex offender and New York socialite Jeffrey Epstein. The Guardian’s Robert Tait reports that the former president has been using a plane Epstein once owned to travel to campaign events:
Donald Trump used a plane that was once owned by Jeffrey Epstein, the late disgraced financier and convicted sex offender, to fly to several presidential campaign events last weekend, it has been revealed.
The former president flew on a Gulfstream G-550 jet whose previous ownership was subsequently traced to Epstein after Trump’s own private plane – a Boeing 757 known colloquially as Trump Force One – encountered engine troubles.
The former Epstein jet was emblazoned with the slogan “Trump 2024” for the duration of the ex-president’s use.
According to the Miami Herald, Trump flew from Bozeman, Montana, to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and then to Aspen, Colorado, before a final trip to Denver on the jet to attend fundraisers as the Republican presidential nominee for November’s election.
The Trump campaign said it was unaware of the plane’s previous ownership when it chartered it from Private Jet Services Group, a charter jet vendor it occasionally uses, after the technical problems with the former president’s own aircraft.
Elon Musk yesterday succeeded in getting Donald Trump to use X, the platform that he wielded as a bully pulpit throughout his presidency, but has generally avoided ever since, even after Musk reversed a ban placed on his account in response to the January 6 insurrection by the company’s then owners.
But Trump’s return to X may not last. The former president has not tweeted since his interview with Musk last night, though he has made several posts on Truth Social, the X-like platform that he owns, and which has become one of his primary mouthpieces over the past four years. We’ll let you know if that changes.
Elon Musk also said that his interview with Donald Trump generated 1bn in both views and discussions:
It was impossible to verify Musk’s statement, but it’s worth noting that Trump, in the interview yesterday, implied that Musk showed him that tens of millions of accounts were listening in, when X’s public count showed that number was closer to 1m.
Musk says he would be willing to interview Harris, too
Following his conversation with Donald Trump last night, Elon Musk said he would be willing to host a similar interview with Kamala Harris:
Happy to host Kamala on an Spaces too
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024
Musk proposed using X’s Spaces feature, which allows live audio broadcasts. Should Harris take him up on the offer, one wonders if he will first fix whatever issue caused the more than 40-minute delay in beginning his interview with Trump last night.
George Santos, the former Republican New York congressman, is appearing in court for a pre-trial hearing today in the federal fraud case against him.
Santos has pleaded not guilty to charges of defrauding supporters, illegally receiving benefits and lying to Congress.
The trial is set to begin with jury selection on 9 September, and the parties have proposed for opening statements to begin 16 September.
Alice Herman
Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota will defend her seat on Tuesday in the state Democratic primary, a rematch against Don Samuels that comes two years after she barely eked out a victory against him.
Tuesday’s race is the last in a series of heated primaries for the progressive “squad” of House Democrats who have been vocal in their criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza. Her fellow squad members Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri were recently defeated by candidates supported by a deluge of pro-Israel spending. But Omar faces a lower-key race.
The two-term congresswoman became the first woman of color to represent Minnesota in the US House of Representatives in 2019. While in office, she has allied herself with the left wing of the Democratic party, serving as the deputy chair of the Congressional Progressive caucus and backing key progressive measures like the Green New Deal and Medicare for All.
Even before the 7 October Hamas attacks and Israel’s ensuing offensive, Omar had established herself as a vocal critic of Israel. She famously drew criticism in 2019 for quipping that US politicians’ support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins”, in reference to donations from the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (Aipac). The comment drew accusations of antisemitism and she later apologized for it.
In the wake of the 7 October attacks, and as Israel escalated its retaliatory war, Omar was among the first in Congress to call for a ceasefire. She has spoken out in support of the university encampments in solidarity with Gaza. Her daughter was suspended from Barnard College for taking part.
The Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, will address union members in Los Angeles today as part of his first solo campaign stop since he was announced as Kamala Harris’s running mate.
Walz is scheduled to deliver remarks at the convention of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), one of the nation’s largest public sector unions, in Los Angeles today at 12.35 pm PT.
He is also expected to deliver remarks at a campaign reception in Newport, California, at 2.30pm PT today.
David Smith
Oscar Wilde once described the English country gentleman galloping after a fox as “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable”. Elon Musk interviewing Donald Trump surely qualifies as the incoherent in full pursuit of the unendurable.
The men’s joint appearance in an audio conversation on X on Monday night was, as expected, a display of two planet-sized egos, toxic masculinity and breathtaking mendacity. More surprisingly it was also dull, like sitting with two drunks at a bar trying to set the world to rights over more than two hours.
The main message: if Trump doesn’t win the election, and if Musk doesn’t become the emperor of the universe, you’re not going to have a country any more.
Musk and Trump’s banal chatter about subjects such as radioactive vegetables and the defeat of Napoleon made you crave a return to what came first: a blissful 40 minutes of wallpaper music. That was because crippling technical glitches left thousands of people unable to join.
Read the full sketch from our Washington DC bureau chief: The Musk-Trump X interview: a surprisingly dull meeting of two planet-sized egos
Maanvi Singh
Donald Trump returned to the social media platform that turbocharged his career for a live discussion with Elon Musk. The former president unleashed familiar rambling, vitriolic talking points to a sympathetic Musk.
Here are key takeaways from the event.
Joan E Greve
Donald Trump sat down with billionaire Elon Musk on Monday for a rambling and vitriolic interview that revisited many of the former president’s most divisive talking points.
The interview on X, which is owned by Musk, got off to an inauspicious start, with technical issues that initially prevented many users from watching the conversation. Musk blamed the delay on a “massive” cyber-attack, but the cause of the glitch was not entirely clear.
After the interview started more than 40 minutes late, Trump – who at times appeared to have a lisp – began the conversation by recounting the failed assassination attempt against him last month at Musk’s request. Although Trump previously said he would only share the story once at the Republican convention last month, he again discussed in detail his brush with death at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, which he said he would visit again in October.
Trump told Musk:
It was a miracle. If I hadn’t turned my head, I would not be talking to you right now, as much as I like you.
Here’s a clip from the interview:
Harris campaign condemns Trump’s ‘extremism and dangerous agenda’ after Musk interview
Good morning US politics readers. On Monday night, Donald Trump sat down with billionaire Elon Musk for an interview on X that began 45 minutes late, featured the Republican presidential nominee’s greatest hits and biggest lies, in which he denigrated immigrants and attempted to paint Kamala Harris as a “radical” leftist, repeatedly mispronounced her name, and called the Democratic presumptive nominee “beautiful”.
Throughout the conversation, the two men lavished praise and admiration on each other and at the end, Musk told Trump he was “on the right path”. Here are key takeaways from the event.
The Harris campaign condemned the interview as an example of Trump’s “extremism and dangerous Project 2025 agenda”. Joseph Costello, a Harris campaign spokesperson, said:
Trump’s entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himself – self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a live stream in the year 2024.
The interview came as Harris has pulled ahead in polls following the launch of her campaign last month. The Decision Desk HQ and the Hill’s national polling average now shows Harris with a 0.3% lead over Trump, who had a 3.3% advantage over Joe Biden before the president withdrew from the race.
Harris appears to be in an even stronger position in the key battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which will likely determine the outcome of the election in November. According to a recent set of surveys conducted last week by the New York Times and Siena College, Harris now leads by four points in those three states, while prior polls showed a virtual tie or a slight Trump advantage in those states.
Here’s what else we’re watching:
12.20pm ET. Joe Biden and the first lady, Jill Biden, will depart the White House en route to New Orleans.
3.35pm. Minnesota governor and Kamala Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, will deliver remarks at the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Convention in Los Angeles. He will later deliver remarks at a campaign reception in Newport, California.
