Former President Donald Trump's interview with X CEO Elon Musk is coming back to haunt him.
The United Auto Workers on Tuesday said that they were filing a formal complaint against Trump after he heaped praise on Musk for crushing his employees' efforts to form a union at his companies.
"I mean, I look at what you do,” Trump told Musk during their lengthy conversation. “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 UAW said that it viewed the exchange as an effort to illegally intimidate workers who have rights under the law to organize unions.
"Under federal law, workers cannot be fired for going on strike, and threatening to do so is illegal under the National Labor Relations Act," wrote the UAW on Musk's own platform, the social media website formerly known as Twitter.
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In a formal statement, UAW President Shawn Fain took another shot at Trump.
"When we say Donald Trump is a scab, this is what we mean," Fain said. "When we say Trump stands against everything our union stands for, this is what we mean. Donald Trump will always side against workers standing up for themselves, and he will always side with billionaires like Elon Musk, who is contributing $45 million a month to a Super PAC to get him elected. 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."
Trump has tried to lure union workers away from the Democratic Party, but so far the UAW and other major unions have resisted his entreaties.
