Tesla recently gave some of its factory workers raises, but union-represented workers at Detroit’s Big Three will still make a lot more per hour.
According to internal documents reviewed via Business Insider, new pay rules for Tesla were implemented on January 8. Employees at Tesla factories now earn between $22 and $39 an hour, according to the documents.
Tesla is the latest automaker to raise wages after the United Auto Workers won big pay raises for its members at Ford, GM and Jeep maker Stellantis last year. Although Tesla’s new salaries bring its staff closer to the average salary of auto factory staff in the sector, the base salary is still far behind that of a UAW worker.
At GM, for example, the starting rate for a production worker is $25.25 per hour, with a top rate of $36.00 per hour, as of the end of last year. By the end of the contract term in September 2027, the minimum will be $30.60 per hour, with a top end of $42.95 per hour.
The pay scales at Ford and Stellantis are similar, with salaries topping $42 an hour at the end of their four-year contracts. These staff also pay contributions from their salaries (between 0. 8% and 1. 1% of their gross monthly salary) which go to a strike and defence fund to pay staff if the union decides to leave the job.
After a historic strike to win its contracts last year, the UAW now has its eyes on Tesla. But the opinion of employees there and the company’s anti-union rhetoric will likely make the war more difficult.
Despite the pay gap, some Tesla workers in the past told BI they would hesitate to join a union.
The staff spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid possible repercussions if they spoke publicly about their employer.
Some Tesla employees said they joined the company because they believed in CEO Elon Musk’s vision. They are willing to accept lower salaries to work at the company, several employees said. Some also pointed to the millions of dollars veteran Tesla employees have earned through stock options, a unique aspect of the race for a company that has seen its stock value rise 800% in the past five years.
The automaker has its own tactic of weeding out pro-union employees, staff said.
“It’s precisely a requirement to be a Tesla fan, but it can have some influence,” said an employee familiar with Tesla’s hiring process.
Given the popularity of Musk and Tesla, the EV company is not lacking in interest from factory painters. More than 3. 6 million people have joined Tesla in 2022.
Tesla’s startup culture, in which Musk asks factory staff to virtually “sleep on the tightrope,” is necessarily consistent with a union culture, one employee said.
Musk and his corporate vehicle have clashed with the National Labor Relations Board several times.
Last year, the National Labor Relations Board alleged that Tesla fired dozens of people at its Buffalo, New York, facility after staff announced plans to unionize.
Similarly, in 2021, the NLRB ruled that Tesla and Musk “unlawfully threatened” the workers hoping to unionize in 2017 and ordered the company to rehire a union-activist worker it had fired even after Tesla attempted to appeal the decision. The board said Tesla “interrogated” employees involved in the effort and ordered Musk to delete a tweet it deemed “anti-union.” (The tweet is still up).
Tesla has never held a union vote at any of its US facilities. But the German union IG Metall said last year that some Tesla workers at the company’s Brandenburg plant had joined its union.
Musk, for his part, has in the past publicly invited the UAW to hold a union election at Tesla, expressing confidence that his workers would vote against organizing and saying that “former UAW members who work at Tesla are not huge fans of UAW.”
Tesla employs more than 140,000 people worldwide, and has more than 20,000 at its factory in Fremont, California.
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