The United Auto Workers president, Shawn Fain, called Donald Trump a “scab” on Tuesday as the union filed federal unfair labor practice charges against the former president and Elon Musk on Tuesday over comments the two made during a live stream on X.
“You’re the greatest cutter,” Trump told Musk. “I mean, I look at what you do,” Trump said. “You walk in, you 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 OK, you’re all gone. You’re all gone. So, every one of you is gone.”
The union noted that threatening to fire workers for striking is illegal, given all workers have protected rights to strike under federal labor laws in the US.
“When we say Donald Trump is a scab, this is what we mean. When we say Trump stands against everything our union stands for, this is what we mean,” said Fain in a press release announcing the charges.
“Donald Trump will always side against workers standing up for themselves, and he will always side with billionaires like Elon Musk,” said Fain. “Both Trump and Musk want working-class people to sit down and shut up, and they laugh about it openly. It’s disgusting, illegal and totally predictable from these two clowns.”
Musk has previously been reprimanded for comments made on X, formerly Twitter. In 2021, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ordered Musk to delete a tweet in which he threatened workers for trying to organize a union, ruling the tweet violated federal labor law. Musk is still appealing the ruling, while in separate cases he has presented arguments against labor law violations that claim the National Labor Relations Board is unconstitutional.
Trump has a long record of opposing labor unions and scaling back worker rights under his first presidential term.
“It’s trying to expose more than anything politically what Donald Trump is about in terms of workers, and Musk as well,” Wilma Liebman, former NLRB chair under Barack Obama, told Reuters. “Everyone knows the NLRB remedies are toothless to start with, but it’s not so much for the remedy as for sending both a political message and an organizing message.”
