Fighting for justice & accountability at Buffalo’s Tesla plant
This post comes from the Tesla team at Clean Air.
Hello,
We’re a team of former employees of Tesla’s Gigafactory 2 in South Buffalo. We represent a much larger group of current and former Tesla workers. We’re here because we have all faced hostility, abuse, and discrimination while working at Tesla, and we’re fighting for justice and accountability.
We’ve had a busy year: we’ve shared our stories with journalists, elected officials, and policymakers. We organized Tesla shareholders to speak on our behalf at Tesla’s 2020 Annual Meeting of Shareholders and we organized people from all across the country to amplify our demands with the Tesla Worker’s Toolkit.
And then we made the impossible happen: we disrupted Tesla’s 2020 Annual Meeting of Shareholders by getting our comment read live, forcing Tesla’s powerful executives to face the truth in real time.
Along the way, we have built real and deep relationships with each other, and connected with more and more workers who have experienced the racism, sexism, and abuse that happen every day at Gigafactory 2.
We are committed to this fight because it is bigger than what happened to any one of us: when workplaces are allowed to abuse their workers with low wages, harassment, discrimination, and exploitation, and without consequence, we all suffer the consequences. And when the government gives $959 million of our public money to companies owned by multi-billionaires in order to do so, we are all responsible for holding them accountable.
In 2021, we are going to continue to fight for New York State to intervene at Gigafactory 2, on behalf of all the workers who have been harmed and our entire community, who was tricked into spending nearly a billion dollars on a workplace that was supposed to transition our economy into the future, and instead is cementing structural racism and sexism into Western New York’s economy for generations to come.