It’s hard to know exact­ly what con­sti­tutes ​“man­u­fac­tur­ing hell,” but it might also be dif­fi­cult to ever find out. That’s because, since last Novem­ber, Tes­la has required employ­ees to sign con­fi­den­tial­i­ty agree­ments which pre­vent them from dis­cussing work­place con­di­tions. This pol­i­cy has faced increased crit­i­cism since Feb­ru­ary, as work­ers at Tesla’s Fre­mont, Calif. plant have expressed con­cern over wages, safe­ty and their right to union­ize. They have reached out to the Unit­ed Auto­mo­bile, Aero­space and Agri­cul­tur­al Imple­ment Work­ers of Amer­i­ca (UAW) union, which is now intervening.

Tes­la CEO Elon Musk has been mak­ing more head­lines than usu­al late­ly. Short­ly after the busi­ness mag­nate claimed he had received gov­ern­men­tal approval to build a hyper­loop from New York to Wash­ing­ton, D.C., he got into a pub­lic argu­ment with Face­book CEO Mark Zucker­berg about the future of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. Musk also recent­ly made com­ments regard­ing the pro­duc­tion of Tesla’s new Mod­el 3, a bat­tery-elec­tric sedan. ​“We’re going to go through at least six months of man­u­fac­tur­ing hell,” he told journalists.

Last week, some of those work­ers made spe­cif­ic demands. A group called Tes­la Work­ers’ Orga­niz­ing Com­mit­tee sent a let­ter to the company’s board mem­bers seek­ing safe­ty improve­ments and a clear­er pro­mo­tion pol­i­cy. The let­ter cites 2015 data from the Bureau of Labor Sta­tis­tics, the last full year for which such infor­ma­tion is avail­able. ​“For that year, data from the Bureau of Labor Sta­tis­tics indi­cates that our injury rate was high­er than that of sawmills and slaugh­ter hous­es. Acci­dents hap­pen every day,” reads the let­ter. The com­mit­tee also addressed Tesla’s resis­tance to work­place orga­niz­ing: ​“We should be free to speak out and to orga­nize togeth­er to the ben­e­fit of Tes­la and all of our work­ers. When we have raised this with man­age­ment we have been met with anti-union rhetoric and action.”

Atten­tion was orig­i­nal­ly drawn to the factory’s orga­niz­ing fight after Tes­la employ­ee Jose Moran pub­lished a Medi­um post on Feb­ru­ary 9. Moran rais­es safe­ty con­cerns, writ­ing that, a few months ago, six of the eight peo­ple on his work team were on leave due to work­place injuries. He also breaks down prob­lems with the factory’s wages. Accord­ing to Moran, work­ers at the Tes­la fac­to­ry make between $17 and $21 in Alame­da coun­ty, an area where the liv­ing wage is more than $28 an hour. Moran wrote that some of his cowork­ers make a two-hour com­mute to work because they can’t afford to live near the factory.

“Tesla’s Pro­duc­tion Asso­ciates are build­ing the future: They are doing the hard work to build the elec­tric cars and bat­tery packs that are nec­es­sary to reduce car­bon emis­sions. But they are paid sig­nif­i­cant­ly below the liv­ing wage for one adult and one child in our com­mu­ni­ty,” Maria Noël Fer­nan­dez, cam­paign direc­tor of the local work­er advo­ca­cy group Sil­i­con Val­ley Ris­ing, told In These Times via email. ​“We believe that green jobs should be good jobs, and that they have a right to orga­nize and advo­cate for them­selves and their families.”

The day after Moran pub­lished his post, employ­ees passed out lit­er­a­ture con­tain­ing the piece dur­ing a shift change at the fac­to­ry. Accord­ing to an unfair labor prac­tice charge with the Nation­al Labor Rela­tions Board (NLRB) made by work­ers, and obtained by Cap­i­tal and Main, this prompt­ed man­age­ment to sched­ule a meet­ing where work­ers were told they couldn’t pass out infor­ma­tion unless it was pre-approved by the employ­er. The same NLRB charge accus­es Tes­la of ille­gal sur­veil­lance and intimidation.

Moran’s piece, and the sub­se­quent accu­sa­tions, were tak­en seri­ous­ly enough to be addressed by Elon Musk direct­ly. In an email to employ­ees, obtained by Buz­zfeed, Musk declared that safe­ty con­cerns ignored vast improve­ments estab­lished in 2017. Tes­la also put out a state­ment echo­ing Musk’s claims. The company’s data points to a 52 per­cent reduc­tion in lost time inci­dents and a 30 per­cent reduc­tion in record­able inci­dents dur­ing the company’s first quarter.

Musk promised a ​“real­ly amaz­ing par­ty” for work­ers after the Mod­el 3 reached vol­ume pro­duc­tion. In addi­tion to the par­ty, the fac­to­ry would even­tu­al­ly include free frozen yogurt stands and a roller coast­er. ​“It’s going to get crazy good,” he wrote. As for Moran, Musk claimed he was a paid UAW plant and that he had looked into his claims and dis­cov­ered they weren’t true. The UAW, he explained, ​“does not share our mis­sion” and their ​“true alle­giance is to the giant car com­pa­nies, where the mon­ey they take from employ­ees in dues is vast­ly more than they could ever make from Tesla.”

This wouldn’t be the last time Musk would use such lan­guage in regards to a union. Six months after Tes­la acquired Germany’s Grohmann Engi­neer­ing, Musk found him­self clash­ing with the country’s dom­i­nant met­al­work­ers’ union, IG Met­all. The union inter­vened to insist that Tes­la straight­en out a wage dis­crep­an­cy that had some work­ers claim­ing they were mak­ing 30 per­cent less than union rates. Musk sent a let­ter to Grohmann employ­ees offer­ing a one-time bonus — an extra 150 Euros a month — and Tes­la shares instead of a pay increas­es that the employ­ees desire. ​“I do not believe IG Met­all shares our mis­sion,” reads the letter.

“We’re a mon­ey-los­ing com­pa­ny,” Musk told The Guardian in May. ​“This is not some sit­u­a­tion where, for exam­ple, we are just greedy cap­i­tal­ists who decid­ed to skimp on safe­ty in order to have more prof­its and div­i­dends and that kind of thing.” Two months after that inter­view, Auto­mo­tive News report­ed that Musk had been the high­est paid auto exec­u­tive of 2016, exer­cis­ing stock options worth $1.34 bil­lion. Musk’s incred­i­ble eco­nom­ic suc­cess hasn’t exact­ly been gen­er­at­ed via an unfet­tered free mar­ket. Accord­ing to data com­piled by the Los Ange­les Times in 2015, Musk’s com­pa­nies have ben­e­fit­ed from bil­lions in gov­ern­ment subsidies.

Whether or not Tesla’s board mem­bers are recep­tive to employ­ee demands, it seems clear that the work­ers’ strug­gle is not going away any­time soon.