Some Tesla workers say they'd never join a union, even as Ford and GM workers get big raises

The United Auto Workers might have set its sights on Tesla, but some workers at the EV company told Insider they'd be hard-pressed to join a union.

After reaching tentative agreements with Detroit automakers, the union's president, Shawn Fain, said last week that the UAW aims to expand its reach. And what better target than the most valuable car company in the world?

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 claiming that «former UAW members who work at Tesla are not huge fans of UAW.» Tesla employs over 127,000 workers across the globe, including over 20,000 at its Fremont factory in California.

With the new UAW contracts, Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis are set to spend up to $35 more per hour than Tesla on labor costs, including hourly wages and benefits. Even before the 36-day strike, Ford and GM already spent over $20 more per hour on factory workers than Tesla, according to analysts. Musk said on X in September that Tesla pays more than the UAW and Tesla workers can also benefit from the company's employee stock offerings, claiming that «quite a few of our factory techs who work on the line have become millionaires.»

Yet even as the UAW made headlines this year and some experts speculated that Tesla could benefit from the autoworkers strike, nine Tesla workers told Insider that the strike was far from a topic of conversation at Tesla — and few factory workers were even aware of the UAW's initial demands.

Despite the pay difference, seven Tesla workers told Insider they wouldn't want to work in a unionized factory and predicted that the UAW would struggle to find its footing at the EV company. The workers spoke under the condition of anonymity in order to avoid potential repercussions for speaking publicly about their employer.

«Tesla still very much has a startup culture and that's a lot different than a union culture,» one Tesla worker at the Fremont factory told Insider. «I think people join Tesla because they want to work hard. They want to push themselves. They want to find ways to stand out by going above and beyond and that's