The article says that, unfortunately, they’re on kind of shaky ground here.
The action came after Musk and Trump held a two-hour conversation on social media platform X on Monday night, during which Trump complimented Musk’s ability to cut costs by saying he would not tolerate workers going on strike.
“You’re the greatest cutter,” Trump said during the conversation. “I mean, I look at what you do. You walk in, you just 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 okay, you’re all gone.’” Musk chuckled but did not respond to Trump’s comments, making it harder for the NLRB to find him liable for making illegal threats to workers at his companies, said Wilma Liebman, chair of the NLRB under former President Barack Obama.
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 said in a statement.
I totally agree that they violated that law in spirit, but I don’t know if the NLRB will go for it.