Labor News & Commentary July 9, 2024 Paris airport workers announce a strike ahead of the Olympics & more

https://onlabor.org/july-9-2024/

By Sunah Chang

Sunah Chang is a student at Harvard Law School.

In today’s news and commentary: Bloomberg publishes an investigation into workplace sexual harassment at SpaceX, Paris airport workers announce a strike ahead of the Olympics, and Korean autoworkers reach a tentative agreement with Hyundai.

Yesterday, Bloomberg Businessweek published an investigative report examining sexual harassment allegations against SpaceX. Two years ago, SpaceX terminated eight workers after they spoke out against the company’s hyper-masculine culture. According to these workers, it was commonplace for male workers at SpaceX to subject women to inappropriate jokes mimicking Musk’s tweets, openly stare at women’s bodies, and disparage their capability of being engineers. When the workers came together to pen an open letter to management expressing concerns about the company’s culture, SpaceX fired them.

In January of this year, the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint against SpaceX, which alleged that the company’s decision to fire the eight employees was unlawful. However, the NLRB’s case has been indefinitely postponed pending SpaceX’s separate lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the NLRB. Facing this legal purgatory, the employees have proceeded to file another lawsuit in California state court, which accuses SpaceX and Elon Musk of sexual harassment and whistleblower retaliation.

FULL story at link above.