NLRB complaint alleges Lucid fired employees for union effort

By Chris Isidore, CNN

New York (CNN) — A federal labor regulator has filed a complaint against electric vehicle maker Lucid, accusing the company of firing two employees who supported a United Auto Workers union organizing effort at the company.

The complaint was filed Tuesday by a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board in Arizona, who investigated the claim about the firings early last year. It was disclosed by the agency late Thursday.

Lucid has about 2,000 hourly US workers, according to the United Auto Workers union. It is still a niche automaker with a target of making between 8,000 to 8,500 luxury electric vehicles this year. It also lost $2 billion in the first nine months of last year but is backed with money from and is majority-owned by Saudi Arabia.

In a statement Lucid said it respects employees’ rights under the National Labor Relations Act to choose whether or not to organize.

“We are confident that there is no factual basis for the complaint,” it said.

The UAW announced an effort to organize 13 nonunion automakers with plants in the United States, including both foreign automakers such as Toyota, Honda and Volkswagen, as well as domestic electric vehicle makers like Tesla, Rivian and Lucid. But the complaints about the firing at Lucid was made back in February of 2023, well before the organizing effort was first publicized by the union in November. That organizing campaign was announced in the wake of its lucrative new contracts with unionized automakers General Motors, Ford and Stellantis that followed a six-week plus strike.

Several of the nonunion automakers have increased the wages of their hourly US workers since the end of the UAW strike, partly in recognition that the union raises that could top 30% during the life of the contracts could give the UAW a stronger argument to win the right to represent employees at those companies.

This is not the first time the union has attempted to organize outside of its traditional Big Three stronghold. It has been able to get enough support at Volkswagen’s plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to have union elections there twice, and twice at plants operated by Nissan in Canton, Mississippi, and Smyrna, Tennessee. But most of the efforts to organize companies like Tesla failed before even reaching the point of an NLRB-supervised representation election.

US labor law makes it very difficult for unions to win representation votes, with employers facing very limited penalties if they engage in unfair labor practices against union supporters among its work force, such as firing them for their support of the union. This case demonstrates that. Not only does this complaint come nearly a year after the union and employees brought the firings to the attention of the NLRB, but the hearing on the complaint has been set for October 9 of this year. So, the employees who lost their jobs would have to wait nearly two years to be reinstated with backpay, in their best-case scenario.

And even if the employees are awarded their backpay, the amount of the payment is reduced by whatever sum of money the fired employees earned in other jobs in the intervening period.

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