Federal labor officials accused rocket company SpaceX on Wednesday of illegally firing eight employees for releasing a letter critical of the company’s founder and CEO Elon Musk.
According to a complaint issued by a regional office of the National Labor Relations Board, the company fired the employees in 2022 for calling on SpaceX to distance itself from Mr. Musk’s social media comments, including one in which he mocked accusations of sexism. harassment against him. .
The letter released by the employees also called on SpaceX, which has more than 13,000 employees, to clarify its harassment policies and enforce them consistently.
The labor board’s complaint said the company’s president and CEO, Gwynne Shotwell, unlawfully restricted employees from circulating the letter and found similar violations by other executives and managers.
The case is scheduled to go before an administrative judge in early March unless SpaceX agrees to a settlement beforehand. A spokeswoman for the works council said it was seeking comprehensive remedies, including reinstatement and back pay for the workers.
“At SpaceX the rockets may be reusable, but the people who build them are treated as expendable,” said Paige Holland-Thielen, one of the employees who were fired. “I hope these charges hold SpaceX and its leadership accountable for its long history of mistreatment of workers and stifling of speech.”
SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Musk has sometimes taken a hard line with employees at his companies, such as when he fired about half the workforce at Twitter, now known as X, shortly after buying the company in 2022. He later fired about two dozen internal critics of Twitter, which has lost about 80 percent of the 7,500 employees who worked there when the billionaire took over.
Tesla, where Mr. Musk is chief executive, has spent years in litigation in which the labor union accused it of firing a worker for participating in union activity. The board ruled in 2021 that the firing was illegal and ordered Tesla to reinstate the worker with delay, a decision that was upheld by a federal court. The company it is attractive the case further.
The Ministry of Justice sued SpaceX in August, accusing her of discriminating against asylum seekers and refugees in her hiring, but a judge has issued an order preventing this case from proceeding.
In December 2021, a former SpaceX employee posted an essay detailing instances of harassment and fondling by co-workers that she said went largely unaddressed after she reported them.
The essay sparked outrage at the company, which said it would launch a review of its harassment policies.
Next spring, reported Business Insider that SpaceX had paid $250,000 in 2018 to settle a claim in which an employee accused Mr. Musk of exposing himself and sexually propositioning her. Mr. Musk denied the charge and joked about it on Twitter.
Shortly thereafter, a group of employees began brainstorming ideas to make the company less tolerant of harassment and drafting the letter. Ms. Shotwell was aware of the effort and appeared to support it, according to comments she left on an internal communications platform seen by The New York Times.
In mid-June 2022, several employees circulated their letter to their colleagues. The letter called Mr. Musk’s public comments “a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us” and urged the company to “maintain clear consequences for any unacceptable behavior, whether by the CEO or an employee starting on their first day ยป.
While some managers responded sympathetically, within hours Ms Shotwell reprimanded two employees involved in writing and distributing the letter, Tom Moline and Ms Holland-Thielen. “Please immediately stop flooding employee communication channels,” Ms. Shotwell said in an email, adding, “I will take your ignoring my email as insubordination.”
The next day, the company fired Mr. Moline, Ms. Holland-Thielen and three other employees involved in organizing the letter. It fired four others linked to the letter in July and August 2022. (The labor board considered only eight firings because the ninth employee did not file a formal charge.)
The labor board’s complaint said the firings were retaliatory and that Ms. Shotwell and other SpaceX officials had interfered with workers’ rights to engage in legally protected coordinated activities.
He also said a company vice president broke the law by criticizing the letter in a meeting with employees days after it was published and “calling on employees to resign if they disagreed with CEO Elon Musk’s behavior.” The Times previously reported that a company vice president had told employees that the letter was an act of extremism and that Mr. Musk could do whatever he wanted at the company.
The complaint also said a senior human resources official had illegally created the appearance of surveillance when she showed employees involved in drafting letters screenshots of a conversation they had had on a messaging app.
Ryan Mack contributed to the report.