Billionaire Elon Musk filed a federal lawsuit this Thursday against the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which has denounced SpaceX for the dismissal of some employees.
Musk’s lawsuit argues that the NLRB’s structure is unconstitutional, which could upend the American labor system if accepted.
The NLRB, a government agency that enforces labor laws, has its own administrative system of judges and prosecutors. Musk is now filing an amendment against that structure in its entirety.
Musk thus responded to the complaint filed on Wednesday by NLRB prosecutors against SpaceX, accusing the aerospace company of illegally dismissing a group of eight employees in 2022 who had shared a critical letter against the billionaire.
In that letter, workers said that Musk was “a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment” and called on SpaceX leadership to distance itself from its owner and founder’s comments, while encouraging other employees to sign it.
The company defends that the workers were fired because the letter “caused a significant distraction to SpaceX employees across the country.”
According to the owner of SpaceX, Tesla and X (formerly Twitter), the NLRB’s administrative system violates the separation of powers established in the Constitution. “The NLRB’s process against SpaceX deprives it of its constitutional right to a jury trial,” says the lawsuit, filed before a federal district judge in Brownsville (southern Texas).
The NLRB has scheduled the trial on the fired SpaceX workers for next March.
