UAW President Shawn Fain, left, and former President Donald Trump. (Photos by Anna Liz Nichols and Ashley Murray)

The United Auto Workers Union (UAW) announced Tuesday that it has filed federal charges against former President Donald Trump and Tesla founder Elon Musk saying the pair illegally threatened and intimidated workers.

The remarks the UAW is concerned with stem from a Monday night discussion where Musk, a vocal supporter of Trump, held a two-hour discussion on his platform “X” with the presidential candidate where the pair praised each other, talking about foreign policy, immigration, plans for Trump’s reelection and the possibility of Musk to serve on a government efficiency commission in a potential second Trump administration.

Trump said he would “love” to have Musk on such a commission, telling him, “You’re the greatest cutter. I mean, I look at what you do. You walk in and you just say, ‘you want to quit? ‘ They go on strike. I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, ‘that’s okay. You’re all gone.”

Workers can’t be fired for engaging in a legal strike under the National Labor Relations Act and the UAW said in a statement Tuesday that? the pair of “disgraced billionaires” advocated for the illegal firing of workers standing up for themselves.”

“When we say Donald Trump is a scab, this is what we mean,” UAW President Shawn Fain said in a statement Tuesday. Fain has for months spoken in Michigan, supporting president Joe Biden’s campaign and now Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, praising both Democrats for walking picket lines with striking UAW workers.

A request for comment was made to the Trump/Vance campaign, but has yet to be returned.

Kayla Blado, press secretary for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), told Michigan Advance that the NLRB’s Region 5-Baltimore office received an unfair labor practice charge against Donald J. Trump for President, Inc., which is located in Arlington, Virginia, and another complaint filed in Region 32-Oakland against Tesla, which maintains its North American manufacturing facility nearby.

Fain spoke during Harris’ campaign visit to Detroit last week, reminding Michigan voters that while Biden became the first sitting president of the United States to walk a picket line with striking workers, Trump came to Michigan to speak at a non-union plant as the UAW was in the middle of its successful historic strike against Detroit’s “Big Three” automakers.

“Donald Trump will always side against workers standing up for themselves, and he will always side with billionaires like Elon Musk, who is contributing $45 million a month to a Super PAC to get him elected,” Fain said. “Both Trump and Musk want working class people to sit down and shut up, and they laugh about it openly. It’s disgusting, illegal, and totally predictable from these two clowns.”

Trump and Musk’s conversation was marked by technical problems. Musk said the 40 minute delay on the conversation was caused by a distributed denial of service attack of listeners flooding the server to shut it down.

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