The U.S. Supreme Court wants to abolish reproductive rights and return to the days of coat hangers. Elon Musk―the world’s richest man―wants to turn back the clock for all poor and working people.
The 12,000 employees at Musk’s Tesla plant in Fremont, California, work 12-hour days in a racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic hellhole. Black workers refer to it as the “plantation.”
They’re called “monkeys” by supervisors. Foremen sexually harass women workers. Those that complain often get fired.
Musk advised workers who were discriminated against to “be thick-skinned and accept [an] apology.” Black employees were often assigned to the worst part of the factory.
Tesla’s management allows graffiti including swastikas, the n-word and “KKK” to remain on walls for days. You can be sure that if any worker wrote “union” on a wall, it would be immediately taken down.
The Fremont plant was a former GM-Toyota joint venture that closed in 2004. The workers were represented by the United Auto Workers.
Elon Musk hates unions and uses dirty tricks to keep the UAW out.
The National Labor Relations Board cited Musk for threatening workers with the loss of their benefits if they voted for a union.
Racist workers are allowed to flaunt their confederate flag tattoos. This is what Musk means when he says he wants to restore “free speech” to Twitter.
Rocket boy Elon took over the social media platform with $44 billion in largely borrowed money. Larry Ellison, the Trump-loving former CEO of Oracle software, kicked in a billion.
Boston-based Fidelity Investments provided $316 million. This may not seem much compared to its $4.5 trillion in assets under management, but it’s politically significant.
Fidelity is 49% owned by Abigail Johnson and her family, all of whom are Mayflower descendants. It shows that New England’s “old money” is just as bigoted as newer capitalists in Trump’s circle.
Why not? Johnson’s ancestors―the Pilgrims―conducted genocidal wars against the Wampanoags and other Indigenous nations to steal their land.
Elon Musk’s Boer ancestors stole African land. The Bantustans in apartheid South Africa were modeled on Indian reservations in the United States.
‘We can coup whoever we want!’
Last year, Time magazine named Elon Musk as its “man of the year.” In 1938 Time gave the award to Adolf Hitler. He sent union supporters to concentration camps.
Musk hasn’t been able to do that yet. In the meantime, he supports the neo-Nazis in Ukraine fighting against the people of Donbass and their Russian allies.
Musk was thrilled with the 2019 coup in Bolivia that overthrew a democratic, Indigenous-led government. He tweeted, “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”
The Bolivarian people dealt with the coup plotters a year later when they restored the Movement Toward Socialism government. Not incidentally, the Plurinational State of Bolivia has some of the largest reserves of lithium in the world, which is vital for the batteries in Musk’s electric cars.
Virtually all the capitalist media fawns over Musk, who has been anointed a humanitarian for providing satellite services to the Kiev regime.
According to commentator Yasha Levin, most of this was actually subsidized by the U.S. government. Musk is a big military contractor, with the Pentagon being a sugar daddy for Musk’s Space-X rocket company.
Musk’s biological daddy is a millionaire who owned an African emerald mine. He made his fortune because of the apartheid system that enslaved Black people.
Bringing back 12-hour work day
Two hundred years ago British textile employees worked 12-hour days. Elon Musk wants to make that the working standard today.
It took the labor movement over 50 years to win an eight-hour work day and a two-day weekend for most U.S. workers. The Haymarket martyrs ― labor leaders George Engel, Adolph Fischer, Albert Parsons and August Spies ― were hanged in 1887 for demanding an eight-hour work day.
It was to abolish an 84-hour work week that 365,000 steel workers went on strike in 1919. Employees at the now-closed Sparrows Point steel mill outside Baltimore worked 12 hours every day except July 4th and Christmas.
Strikers, led by future communist leader William Z. Foster, shut down most of the steel industry. The entire capitalist class and its newspapers united to smash the strike. Today, almost all of the corporate media want you to support a war against Russia.
Cops beat up strikers while U.S. Army troops were sent to Gary, Indiana, to defeat the strike. After months of these assaults the strike was called-off in January 1920.
Yet this struggle was not in vain. Hatred towards the 12-hour work day deepened. By 1923, U.S. Steel―then the world’s largest corporation―threw in the towel and instituted an eight-hour work day. (“Steelworkers in America, the Nonunion Era,” by David Brody.)
Almost a century later, Elon Musk sends rockets into outer space and wants to go to Mars. Meanwhile, this pig with his $200 billion stash makes 12,000 Tesla employees in Fremont work a 72-hour week.
That’s six days of 12-hour days. Tesla workers often work weeks straight without a day off.
These horrible conditions libel the memory of the Serbian electrical genius Nikola Tesla. He had at one time been a member of the Socialist Labor Party in the United States.
These conditions will also impel Tesla workers to struggle. Henry Ford was forced to sign a union contract. So will Elon Musk.
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