The wave of unions that helped revitalize the American labor movement began at Starbucks in Buffalo, NY, when baristas formed the coffee company’s first union in December 2021.
Now, the same union that helped Starbucks workers help Tesla employees become the first U.S. electric car union at a plant just six miles away, Bloomberg reports.
More than two dozen employees sent a letter to Tesla management early Tuesday, saying the union wants to strengthen the company and fight for better working conditions, job security, and pay. In the notes shown in TwitterThe prospective union, called Tesla Workers United, said it is working with Workers United Upstate New York.
“We want Tesla to be the company we know,” the petition said. “We believe that by having a union, we will continue our mission of sustainability and promote a progressive environment for all of us.”
The Buffalo plant has about 2,000 employees, about 800 of whom work for the company’s Autopilot division, the technology that allows Tesla cars to control themselves automatically. The rest of the workers are part of manufacturing or other functions, accordingly The Wall Street Journal.
The announcement of Tesla workers trying to unionize comes after many attempts by unions to shape the US labor movement in 2021 and 2022. Companies like Apple, Amazon and Starbucks have long been union-free, but in the past year, labor organizers have hour. in a big win by successfully holding elections for unions and pushing for changes in working conditions. In fact, union membership rates, as measured by the percentage of workers’ salaries and wages that are part of a union, have generally declined over the past year.
Since December 2021, when Starbucks workers first organized in Buffalo, more than 250 other stores have voted to form a union. The company has adopted a hard-line stance on unions. Starbucks has yet to agree or sign a contract with the union, though it has said it is open to discussions. With executives backing down and negotiations failing, union efforts at the world’s largest coffee chain have begun to slow in recent months with slower contract deals.
Unions are common in the automotive industry, compared to companies like Starbucks and Apple. Longtime auto industry behemoths like Ford, Mercedes Benz and General Motors have unions in the US and elsewhere in the world.
Tesla, unlike its legacy counterparts, does not have a unionized workforce in the US. The National Labor Relations Board ruled in 2021 that Musk violated labor laws by firing union activists at Tesla, and the NLRB asked him to remove a 2018 tweet in which he was disaffected. union (tweet ie still online). Musk then invited workers in the auto union to vote on possible unionization at Tesla, saying the company “will do nothing to stop it.” Journal reported.
In 2022, Tesla will lay off about 200 employees at the company’s San Mateo, California office. Musk, who has also been CEO of Twitter since last October, was recently cleared of charges from a class-action lawsuit he faced after tweeting that he had funding to take the automaker private in 2018.
The Tesla Workers Union did not immediately return Fortune’s ask for comments. Tesla did not answer Fortune’s request for comment – the company’s public relations department was dissolved in 2020.
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