The world’s most highly-valued automaker has quickly become known as one of its most belligerent employers. Tesla’s rapid market success has been outpaced only by the descent of its corporate leaders into anti-democratic, anti-union politics.
In Germany, Sweden, and the US, Tesla has aggressively violated the right to organise, refused to engage in collective bargaining, and provoked unprecedented strike action for its subversion of social dialogue, a pillar of industrial democracy in many European economies. Tesla’s hostility toward unions earned it a place on a list of Worst Union-Busters of 2023. Tesla’s factories have “reported ten times more safety violations than Nissan … despite the fact that Nissan built almost ten times as many cars over the same period.”
But Tesla does not limit its efforts to weaken democratic norms in highly industrialised economies. Its supply chain relies on nickel mining companies that undermine consultation standards with local Indonesian communities and are deforesting so rapidly that flooding and water pollution threaten neighbourhoods. The company’s supply chain relies on another corporation on our list, Glencore, to mine copper and cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where child labour has allegedly been employed.
Behind Tesla’s policies, of course, is its CEO, Elon Musk, another of the richest men in history. Musk is open in his opposition to trade unions, saying unionisation creates “a lord and peasants sort of thing.” He illegally threatened Tesla workers planning to unionise in California with elimination of their company stock options, and called Swedish workers “insane” for striking. Musk’s anti-union zeal is apparent in his other holdings as well. SpaceX, where he also serves as CEO and is leading global efforts to privatise outer space, has joined another company on our list, Amazon, to try to have courts declare the National Labor Relations Board unconstitutional. The Board has governed disputes between US workers and their employers in the private sector since the 1930s.
While Musk and his companies have contributed millions of dollars to influence policymakers around the world, he has become a hero of the far-right. As owner of the social networking platform X (formerly Twitter), he responded to one user’s allegations about a coup in Bolivia – a country with lithium reserves considered highly valuable for electric vehicle manufacturers like Tesla – by saying, “We will coup whoever we want. Deal with it!” He has committed to donating US$45 million per month to a political action committee to support the re-election campaign of Donald Trump, and sought to build close relationships with other far-right leaders, including Argentina’s Javier Milei and India’s Narendra Modi. Musk has also re-platformed and clearly expressed his support ofwhite nationalist, anti-Semitic, and anti-LGBTQ+ accounts since taking ownership of X.
