Elon Musk Issues Challenge To UAW: Try And Unionize Tesla Fremont Factory Workers At Your 'Convenience' And See if You Win

Tesla Inc TSLA CEO Elon Musk on Thursday challenged the United Auto Workers (UAW) labor union to hold a vote at their "convenience" at the EV maker’s Fremont factory in California and see if they manage to win.

What Happened: President Joe Biden had on Tuesday failed to mention Tesla during his State of the Union speech while praising legacy automakers General Motors Co GM and Ford Motor Co F for their electric vehicle investments and job creation in the United States.

Unlike GM and Ford, Tesla does not have unions at its factories. The Austin, Texas-based company had 99,290 full-time employees at the end of 2021.  

“I’d like hereby to invite UAW to hold a union vote at their convenience,” Musk wrote on the microblogging site Twitter on Thursday. “Tesla will do nothing to stop them.”

Our real challenge is Bay Area has negative unemployment, so if we don’t treat and compensate our (awesome) people well, they have many other offers and will just leave!

I’d like hereby to invite UAW to hold a union vote at their convenience. Tesla will do nothing to stop them.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 3, 2022

The billionaire entrepreneur in the same tweet said that Tesla’s “real challenge” is the negative unemployment in the Bay Area, which means the EV maker has to compensate and treat its employees well.

“...so if we don’t treat and compensate our (awesome) people well, they have many other offers and will just leave!” In a separate tweet, Musk said Tesla factory worker compensation is the highest in the auto industry.

The Tesla CEO also reiterated plans to expand capacity at Fremont, which he said, is the largest auto plant in North America.

“It has built 2/3 of all electric vehicles in North America, twice as much as all other carmakers combined,” Musk said in another tweet that suggested Biden’s snub was related to Tesla being a non-union entity.

Tesla delivered close to a million electric vehicles last year while GM sold 2.2 million vehicles and Ford at 1.90 million vehicles.

Why It Matters: Biden has often skipped mentioning Tesla while being liberal with praising the role of Detroit-based traditional automakers in “leading the world” in electric vehicles.

The U.S. President, in February, had for the first time publicly acknowledged Tesla and called the Musk-led company the nation’s largest producer of electric vehicles.

Musk has in the past called out Biden’s infrastructure bill as insane and how the enormous spending would lead to a $3 trillion deficit. 

Price Action: Tesla shares closed 1.8% lower at $879.9 a share on Wednesday.