By Chris Fry
On November 18 ABC News reported that lawyers for Elon Musk, the richest man in the U.S. with a net worth of $353 billion joined forces with lawyers for Jeff Bezos, the country’s second richest man with a net worth $197 billion, to argue for the dismantling of the 90-year-old National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
Musk’s SpaceX and Tesla and Bezos’ Blue Origin companies are bitter rivals for lucrative government contracts, particularly around their missile and space vehicle ventures. But these two militarist parasites have joined forces in their lawsuit to dismantle this federal agency that is inhibiting their bid to smash union organizing and free speech at their companies.
Despite a powerful company anti-union campaign which included the firing of a lead organizer, workers at an Amazon warehouse in New York City won union recognition in 2022, but Jeff Bezos refuses to bargain for a contract.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX company filed its suit against the NLRB “after the labor agency accused the company of unlawfully firing employees who wrote an open letter critical of Musk and of creating the impression worker activities were being surveilled.”
Musk’s Tesla is the only U.S. auto company not to have its workers represented by a union. 70,000 workers are employed by Tesla in the U.S.
Musk has led campaigns against union organizing, particularly at his Freemont, California plant, which has low pay, long hours and high injury rates.
In 2018, Musk tweeted that Tesla workers would lose their company stock if they voted for a union. The NLRB sued Musk for this illegal tweet, but its ruling was overturned by a federal court in 2024.
Musk has blocked union organizing drives by the United Steelworkers, the IBEW and the Workers United unions at his upstate New York plants.
After its historic 2023 “Stand Up” strike against the Big 3, UAW President Sean Fain has set up a new union organizing drive against Tesla and other non-union companies.
In an online “conversation” between Musk and Trump on Musk’s X platform, Trump praised Musk for his union busting campaigns:
But during a discussion about government spending, Trump praised Musk for firing workers who went on strike. The UAW contends this could intimidate workers for the Trump campaign or at Tesla who might want to join a union.
“You’re the greatest cutter,” Trump told Musk. “I look at what you do. You walk in and say, ‘You want to quit?’ I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike, and you say, ’That’s OK. You’re all gone.’”
Musk said, “Yeah,” and laughed while Trump was talking.
The UAW filed complaints against both Musk and Tesla with the NLRB for this “conversation’s” gross violation of labor law, aimed to intimidate workers engaged in the union organizing drives by implying that Trump’s new regime will help Musk fire workers.
A spokesperson for the NLRB responded to the billionaire’s anti-union lawsuit:
In a statement issued before Monday’s hearing, NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo said it was “nothing new for big companies to challenge the authority of the NLRB to enforce workers’ rights so as not to be held accountable for their violations” of labor law.
Musk says we must suffer “temporarily.”
Both of these anti-union high tech billionaire titans found ways to support the fascist Trump’s election. Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, pulled the plug on the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, declaring the paper’s “neutrality”.
And Musk pumped some $250 million into Trump’s campaign through his political action committee. This has bought him a place at Trump’s elbow. Musk has been in on all the far-right picks for Trump’s cabinet.
But a cabinet position would be “beneath” Musk. Instead, he and Big Pharma’s Vivek Ramaswamy will head a new “advisory” panel called the “Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The nickname DOGE is not by accident. It also is the name of Musk’s cryptocurrency. Musk hopes this new panel will raise its price. And much like Trump himself, Musk also promises that DOGE will sell “hot” merchandise.
Before the election, Musk made clear his intention with DOGE:
“We have to reduce spending to live within our means,” Musk said. “And, you know, that necessarily involves some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity.”
“Everyone’s going to have to take a haircut. … We can’t be a wastrel. … We need to live honestly,” Musk said.
That can translate down to one word – austerity for our class, music to the ears to the entire ruling class. But with more than $10 billion in government contracts and being the beneficiary of huge tax cuts that have lowered his tax rate to below that of the average worker, you cannot expect any hardship for the richest guy in the country or his ilk.
Musk has pledged to cut $2 trillion a year from the $6 trillion annual federal budget. All of the wealth that goes into the government is produced by the working class and is collected either through taxes on our families’ income and a much smaller amount from corporate taxes from the wealth produced by our labor.
Musk and his billionaire cohorts have no intention of returning any of this money to us. Instead, his plans amount to a massive robbery of the “people’s treasury”, just like was done during the Great Recession of 2008, to shift massive amounts of wealth into the coffers of the giant corporations.
A December 3 Axios article reports that Musk has already profited from his new role:
Why it matters: Musk was already the world’s richest person before the election, and now his pocketbook and his power are getting even bigger.
His net worth is now estimated at $353 billion, up $91 billion over the last month, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The big picture: Conveniently seen as the First Buddy to Trump after opening his personal coffers for campaign purposes, Musk is positioned to directly influence federal spending and regulation.
And as investors have signaled, that’s likely to benefit Musk and his expansive business empire.
Case in point: Tesla — which would benefit from a federal regulatory framework for self-driving cars — has seen its share price jump about $100, or 40%, since the election.
SpaceX — which needs to maintain a steady flow of federal contracts — is reportedly poised to sell shares in a deal that would value the company at $350 billion, up nearly $100 billion in a month.
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- On a personal level, Musk would benefit from getting the Securities and Exchange Commission off his back after years of tussling with the agency.
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- And he’s co-leading a government-slashing effort alongside Vivek Ramaswamy dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency, giving him influence over what is and is NOT excised from the federal budget.
And if Musk and Bezos fail to win their court suit to eliminate the NLRB, then anti-labor Musk would be in a position to do the same thing through DOGE.
Musk wants to start by having his DOGE cut funding to federal programs that their Congressional “mandate” has expired:
In line with how he treats workers in his own companies, Musk has also called for all federal workers to be forced to go to their offices 5 days a week. Many have been working some of their time at home because of the pandemic. And because of the pandemic, many childcare facilities have closed their doors.
Musk also calls for the relocation of many federal agencies.
He told the media that both these moves will force many federal workers to quit their jobs.
And just to show what kind of an arrogant vicious monster he is, Musk has put the name and titles of several federal workers on his X site, which has targeted them for a barrage of online attacks and physical threats from fanatic Trumpists.
Musk running the government through Trump. A sign of capitalist strength or weakness?
In his 1848 work “The Communist Manifesto”, Karl Marx wrote: “The executive of the modern state is nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”
But in his 1851 work, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” Marx “…also suggests that it would be better for the bourgeoisie not to wield power directly because this would make their dominance too obvious, creating a clear target for proletarian attack.”
With Musk “taking over” government control from the capitalist minions of both political parties by becoming Trump’s chief counselor and executor, the billionaire class, particularly the so-called “Silicon Valley” section, has dispensed with any such caution.
Why?
With decades of the transfer of U.S. capitalist production from cities and towns across the country to low-wage countries, with its failing and failed military adventures, proxy wars and economic sanction warfare, U.S. imperialism is losing its grip on its global hegemony and its support at home.
Countries around the world, particularly Socialist China, are banding together to escape the U.S. “world order” of sanctions, military bases and interventions, medical neglect, banking controls, theft of natural resources and so on. That challenge has a name: BRICS.
The Pentagon’s massive fleets of ships, troops and planes have not stopped this erosion of imperialist dominance.
Trump’s first term in office showed his fascist inclinations. Musk’s presence at his side now shows that Big Tech, now the dominant capitalist sector, is backing Trump to the hilt. Their intent is to step up the pace of the exploitation of U.S. labor while at the same time to lower the standard of living of workers and the oppressed communities.
And Trump offers to the ruling class a menu of naked repression against any opposition to this agenda, to break strikes, to send in the military to attack demonstrations and the oppressed communities, and more.
But this also exposes imperialism’s growing weakness. Trump and Musk have promised the masses that they can resolve the growing social and economic crises that we face. When they fail, and it is certain that they will, that will make the entire billionaire class itself a “clear target for proletarian attack.”
Now is the time to organize a working-class resistance with growing confidence and resolve.
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