SpaceX accused of unlawfully sacking workers critical of Elon Musk

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Elon Musk’s SpaceX has been accused by a US labour agency of illegally firing eight employees who circulated an open letter criticising the billionaire founder and chief executive. 

Officials at the Los Angeles regional office of the National Labor Relations Board, which enforces collective bargaining laws, said that the employees of the space company were fired after writing the letter denouncing Musk amid a series of controversial posts on the social media site Twitter — which Musk has bought and renamed X — and allegations of sexual harassment against him.

SpaceX violated the employees’ rights to advocate for better working conditions as a group by firing them, labour officials said.

The letter, posted in a Microsoft Teams channel with thousands of employees in 2022, said that Musk’s behaviour had become “a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment” for employees as “every Tweet that Elon sends is a de facto public statement by the company”, according to media reports.

The employees wrote that SpaceX should “publicly address and condemn” Musk’s tweets, clarify the company’s “no asshole” policy, and “hold all leadership equally accountable” for breaches of it.

In response, SpaceX “interrogated” employees about the letter, forbid them from signing or circulating it, and told them not to discuss the company’s investigation into its origins, according to the NLRB’s complaint. 

The NLRB said in a statement that it will seek a settlement with SpaceX before a scheduled hearing in March before one of its in-house judges. Any appeal against the judge’s decision can be taken to a federal court.

Officials are seeking a remedy that would require SpaceX to post a notice about the case and a poster about employee rights in workplaces, as well as to apologise to the fired employees.

“At SpaceX the rockets may be reusable but the people who build them are treated as expendable,” Paige Holland-Thielen, one of the employees who was fired, said in a statement. “I am hopeful these charges will hold SpaceX and its leadership accountable for their long history of mistreating workers and stifling discourse.”

SpaceX and Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Musk previously called the sexual harassment allegation “utterly untrue”.

The complaint is not the first time labour officials in the Biden administration have sued SpaceX over its hiring practices. In a lawsuit filed in August, the justice department accused the company of discriminating against asylum seekers and refugees in its hiring process. A federal judge in Texas put that case on hold in November.