Federal labor officials accused rocket company SpaceX on Wednesday of illegally firing eight employees for circulating a letter critical of the company's founder and CEO Elon Musk.
According to a complaint from a regional office of the National Labor Relations Board, the company fired the employees in 2022 because they asked SpaceX to distance itself from Mr. Musk's social media comments, including one in which he spoke out against him made fun of sexual harassment allegations.
The letter circulated by employees also called on SpaceX, which has more than 13,000 employees, to clarify and consistently enforce its harassment policies.
The labor board's complaint said the company's president and chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell, unlawfully prevented employees from distributing the letter and noted similar violations by other executives and managers.
The case is scheduled to go before an administrative law judge in early March unless SpaceX agrees to a settlement before then.
“At SpaceX, the rockets are reusable, but the people who build them are treated as expendable,” said Paige Holland-Thielen, one of the fired employees. “I hope these allegations will hold SpaceX and its leadership accountable for their long history of mistreating workers and suppressing discourse.”
SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Musk has sometimes taken a hard line toward his companies' employees, such as when he laid off about half the workforce of Twitter, now known as X, shortly after buying the company in 2022. He later fired about two dozen internal critics of Twitter, which lost about 80 percent of the 7,500 employees who worked there when the billionaire took power.
Tesla, where Mr. Musk is chief executive, has waged a years-long legal battle in which labor regulators accused the company of firing an employee for union activity. The board ruled in 2021 that the firing was unlawful and ordered Tesla to reinstate the worker with back pay, a decision that a federal court upheld. The company is appealing the case again.
The Justice Department sued SpaceX in August, accusing it of discriminating in its hiring of asylum seekers and refugees, but a judge issued an injunction blocking that case from proceeding.
In December 2021, a former SpaceX employee published an essay detailing incidents of harassment and harassment from colleagues that she said went largely unaddressed after she reported them.
The essay sparked outrage within the company, which said it would launch a review of its harassment policies.
The following spring, Business Insider reported that SpaceX had paid $250,000 in 2018 to settle a lawsuit in which an employee accused Mr. Musk of exposing himself and making sexual advances on her. Mr. Musk disputed the accusation and joked about it on Twitter.
Not long after, a group of employees began brainstorming ideas to make the company less tolerant of harassment and wrote the letter. Ms. Shotwell was aware of the effort and appeared to support it, according to comments she left on an internal communications platform seen by The New York Times.
In mid-June 2022, several employees distributed their letter to colleagues. The letter called Mr. Musk's public statements a “frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us” and called on the company to “maintain clear consequences for any unacceptable behavior, whether on the part of the CEO or any first-day employee.”
While some managers responded sympathetically, within hours Ms. Shotwell rebuked two employees involved in writing and distributing the letter, Tom Moline and Ms. Holland-Thielen. “Please immediately stop flooding employee communication channels,” Ms. Shotwell said in an email, adding: “I consider ignoring my email as insubordination.”
The next day, the company fired Mr. Moline, Ms. Holland-Thielen and three other employees who were involved in organizing the letter. Four additional employees related to the letter were fired in July and August 2022. (The Labor Department only considered eight layoffs because the ninth employee did not file a formal complaint.)
The labor board's complaint alleges that the firings were retaliatory and that Ms. Shotwell and other SpaceX officials interfered with employees' rights to engage in concerted activities protected by law.
It also said a company vice president violated the law by criticizing the letter at a meeting with employees days after it was distributed and “urging employees to resign if they disagreed with CEO Elon Musk's behavior.” “. The Times previously reported that a company vice president told workers that the letter was an extremist act and that Mr. Musk could do whatever he wanted at the company.
The complaint also alleges that a senior human resources employee improperly created the appearance of surveillance when she showed employees involved in drafting the letter screenshots of a chat they had had on a messaging app.
Ryan Mac contributed reporting.