Musk's SpaceX seeks to blow up federal labor enforcer
Lawyers for Elon Musk’s SpaceX alleged in a lawsuit Thursday that the National Labor Relations Board’s in-house courts are unconstitutional and the agency should be prohibited from taking enforcement actions against it.
The company has been embroiled in employment-related complaints with the NLRB and other federal agencies. If successful, the suit would immediately throw the NLRB’s authority to police the workplace into chaos and create a thorny political issue in an area that for decades has divided Congress.
The complaint, filed in the southern district of Texas, relies heavily on a case currently pending before the Supreme Court, Jarkesy v. SEC. The plaintiff in that case alleges agency tribunals infringe on the constitutional right to a jury trial in civil cases and if administrative law judges — as utilized by the NLRB and many other federal agencies — violate the constitution's separation of powers.
SpaceX also takes issue with the NLRB's five-member board itself, arguing that its members are too difficult for a president to remove despite the “substantial executive power” extended to them to carry out the National Labor Relations Act.
“The NLRB’s current way of functioning is miles away from the traditional understanding of the separation of powers,” the filing states.
Citing a Federalist Paper written by James Madison, it compares the NLRB’s structure to “the very definition of tyranny.”
The filing comes on the heels of NLRB prosecutors issuing a complaint against the company accusing it of illegally firing eight employees who had circulated a letter in 2022 criticizing Musk, its combative CEO. The letter criticized him "for issuing inappropriate, disparaging, sexually charged comments on Twitter,” their lawyers told the NLRB. (Musk also owns the social media platform and rebranded it as X.)
SpaceX is seeking an injunction against the NLRB barring it from moving forward with that case against the company while the constitutional concerns are litigated.
“If the current Members of the NLRB are asked to make a prosecutorial determination about whether SpaceX is in violation of the NLRA, there is an objectively high risk that they would not later be able to provide the neutral adjudicative forum that the Constitution demands, and so would need to recuse from further participation in any agency adjudication against SpaceX,” the company’s attorneys write.
The NLRB declined to comment on the lawsuit.
The NLRB’s complaint alleges that SpaceX interrogated and disparaged employees in relation to the letter, as well as invited employees “to quit if they disagreed with the behavior of Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk.”
SpaceX also led employees to think they were being surveilled by showing them screenshots of communications between employees about the letter, the NLRB alleged.
SpaceX didn’t respond to a request for comment on the complaint.
Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX also drew the ire of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Justice Department, respectively, for employment-related issues in the past six months.
Musk has spoken openly about his disdain for labor unions, while representatives for his companies have contested allegations that it retaliates against employees for trying to organize or otherwise advocate for better working conditions — activity that is protected under the NLRA.