February 19, 2025 • 19 mins
Over the last four-and-a-half years, the footprint of Elon Musk’s Texas business empire has undergone rapid expansion. It now includes SpaceX facilities and a sprawling Tesla gigafactory outside the state capital.
New Bloomberg reporting shows that undocumented workers helped to build some facilities — even as Musk ratcheted up his anti-immigration rhetoric and advocated for a border crackdown.
On today’s Big Take podcast, Bloomberg’s Julia Love investigated how undocumented workers ended up at these sites — and the conditions they encountered — and joined host Sarah Holder to share what she found.
Read more: The Undocumented Workers Who Helped Build Elon Musk’s Texas Gigafactory
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news. Christy was in her
early fifties when she left her native Honduras for the US.
She told Bloomberg's Julia Love that she didn't have authorization
to work in the US, but after a few months
searching for work, she took a job as a cleaner
(00:23):
on a construction site in Texas in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Texas is hot. This site was very exposed to the
sun and the elements, especially in the early days, and
she had to watch long distances. She was logging up
to thirty thousand steps a day.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Christy is her first name. She asked that Bloomberg withhold
her last name for fear of reprisal. She said she
worked twelve hour shifts vacuuming, mopping floors, and scrubbing toilets
in the summer heat. Be Amaskaline that the temperatures reached
(01:07):
up to ninety eight degrees and even though there were
water stations, she says her bosses discouraged workers from using them.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
It will probably my superior. They discouraged that because they
didn't want workers to lose time using the restroom, and
so as a result, workers were struggling to stay properly hydrated.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
One day, Christy was vacuuming a staircase to clear dust
and debris. Or Christie says, the area wasn't ventilated, she
was sweating heavily. The vacuums she'd been given had a
short tube, so she was bending over to reach the ground.
(01:58):
The last thing she remembers standing up and everything going
darksas she woke up on a stretcher in a clinic
nearby to the news that she had suffered heat stroke.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
So sadly, these working conditions are common for undocumented workers
in the United States. They are some of the most
vulnerable workers in our economy. They faced greater risk if
they speak out about dangerous workplace conditions, and so as
(02:39):
a result, they often suffer more than other workers.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
But there's one aspect of Christie's story that Julia says
is unique.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
What's noteworthy about her story is the owner of the
construction project, Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla, who
has really rose to political power over the past year
with an anti immigrant message.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the big take from
Bloomberg News Today. On the show, an investigation into how
undocumented workers helped fuel the expansion of Tesla and SpaceX
in Texas, while Elon Musk advocated for a crackdown at
the border. One month into President Donald Trump's second term,
(03:36):
Elon Musk has been busy aggressively shrinking the size of
the federal government, targeting agencies like USAID and the Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau. After spending nearly three hundred million dollars
supporting Trump's presidential campaign, the billionaire CEO is now a
regular by Trump's side, but Bloomberg's Julia Love says for
(03:56):
most of his time in the public eye, Musk hasn't
been seen as a very political figure. As he's become
more conservative over the last few years, he's also become
more outspoken in his opposition to immigration. If we were
to chart the full arc of Elon Musk and US immigration,
where does that story really start?
Speaker 2 (04:16):
So he himself is an immigrant. He was born in
South Africa, and The Washington Post has reported that in
the early days of his career, when he was launching
one of his first startups, he himself was working without
authorization in the United States, and it was something that
(04:39):
his investors were concerned about. Musk has denied this on
X and through the years he's been a big advocate
for visas for highly skilled workers, the H one B
visa program. Tesla receives a lot of these visas for
engineers and other workers. Really in the past few years
(05:02):
that he has become so outspoken about the US Mexico
border and advancing these narratives that migrants are a threat
to public safety and that they're being used to dame
the election with little to no evidence. I think it
was in late twenty twenty three that he expressed concern
(05:24):
about what was happening to the border, and he traveled
to edele Pass, which is on the Texas stretch of
the border. And after that trip and all throughout twenty
twenty four, he became very outspoken about immigration.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Can you give us a sense of the kinds of
things that Musk was posting on X about immigration and
the lead up to the election. Yes.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
So, here's an example from February of twenty twenty four.
He wrote, illegals in a marriage had can get bank loans, mortgages, insurance, drivers' licenses,
free healthcare California and New York and in state college tuition.
What's the point of being a citizen if an illegal
(06:10):
gets all the benefits but doesn't pay taxes or do
Jerry duty. And then there's another tweet from March fifth,
in which he wrote, this administration is both importing voters
and creating a national security threat from unvetted illegal immigrants.
(06:30):
It is highly probable that the groundwork is being laid
for something far worse than nine to eleven just a
matter of time.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
These are incendiary posts. Did he have any evidence to
back these up?
Speaker 2 (06:42):
There were cases in which he would highlight an isolated
arrest of one migrant and kind of use that to
paint a picture that immigrants are dangerous, are threat to
public safety. There were other cases in which it is
especially the assertions of voter importation, in which he had
(07:03):
no evidence.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
How has that shift tracked with his move towards alloying
himself with President Trump.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Yeah, I think it's one of the issues where they
really come together, and I think that he has framed
it as one of the reasons why he felt like
Biden should not remain in office, that President Biden did
not have a handle on the border, you know, like
(07:32):
many on the right, and like Trump himself, he framed
the border as in a state of crisis and was
stressing the need for change.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Even before Musk took a sharp turn towards the right,
he had started to turn away from his longtime home
base of California and started moving his companies to Texas.
He broke ground on two major projects outside Austin, the
Tesla gigafactory and a SpaceX facility. Can you give us
a sense of the scale of the Tesla gigafactory he
(08:03):
built there?
Speaker 2 (08:04):
It's huge. It's about ten million square feet by some measures,
it's the second largest building in the world. And it
was a real challenge to find enough workers to build
this project. Workers on the project have told me that
staffing was constantly an issue.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
This is where Christie worked, the cleaner you heard from
at the top of the episode. She had been hired
by a Teslas subcontractor after she fainted from heatstroke on
the job. She says she had a dispute with her
supervisor about the incident and was fired. Christi eventually filed
a pair of complaints with OSHA, the Occupational Safety and
Health Administration, accusing the Tesla subcontractor of unsafe working conditions
(08:51):
and retaliation She's being represented by the Worker's Defense Project,
a Texas nonprofit that advocates for immigrant labors. Christy was
one of nine current and former undocumented workers at the
gigafactory who Julia spoke to. Julia also spoke with one
undocumented worker who helped build a SpaceX factory outside of Austin.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
In some cases, they showed me photos and videos that
they took at the site, and in other cases they
were accompanied by friends or family members who also echoed
details of their stories.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
What made you want to look into the citizenship status
of these workers?
Speaker 2 (09:33):
I thought it was interesting to explore whether must actions
reflected this rhetoric. He's been urging the government to do
more to vet the migrants that it lets in, and
I was curious to know if he was scrutinizing his
own operations on this front. And I think the construction
(09:58):
sector is an intro testing one to consider it, because
that labyrinth of contractors really does give owners a lot
of plausible deniability.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Tesla and SpaceX didn't respond to interview requests or detailed
questions for the story. Musk didn't respond to requests for
comments sent to him and his lawyer prior to publication.
Coming up, we'll look at how these undocumented workers came
to be hired at Tesla and SpaceX construction sites and
what their working conditions were like. When Tesla set out
(10:42):
to build a massive manufacturing facility in Austin, Texas, Bloomberg's
Julia Love says, the timeline for construction was extraordinarily ambitious.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
I've been told that a project like this might easily
take seven years to complete under normal construction timetables, and
Tesla began limited production at the facility a little over
a year after it began construction.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
Wow, so that's much faster than it would typically take. Absolutely,
and how did that play into their hiring decisions.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
Well, in order to meet this ambitious timetable, Tesla needed
a lot of workers, and I think that the way
in which the construction industry operates meant that they did
not necessarily have to inquire how their contractors were finding
(11:37):
those workers.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
Tesla didn't hire workers directly. They employed contractors, and those
contractors employed subcontractors, and Julia says to source workers, these
contractors coordinated with local affiliates of the plumbing, carpentry, and
electrical unions, but they also used other tactics.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Tesla's contractors, I'm told hi labor brokers, which brought in
workers from the Riodrand Valley, where workers often made less.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
Not all the workers that were hired to work at
the Tesla site had authorization to work in the United States,
and Julia says these immigrants played a pivotal role in
the construction of the gigafactory.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
They worked as cleaners, plumbers, welders, roofers, pretty much any
construction job that you can imagine.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
And it wasn't just the Tesla site in Austin. One
undocumented worker Julia spoke with helped build SpaceX's factory in Bastrop, Texas.
The companies themselves and Elon Musk, the man who leads them,
weren't directly involved in the contractors or their subcontractors hiring decisions,
but Julia says there's more they could have done to
(12:51):
enforce certain hiring standards.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
I am told that Tesla did have some instructions that
it communicated to its contractors. They stress to them the
importance of checking for authorization to work, running red testing,
things like that, but they did not monitor to ensure
that their contractors were complying with their wishes, and I
(13:19):
think this speaks to kind of a culture in the
construction industry that that's the contractor's business, that it's up
to the contractor to mine their own affairs.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Julia's sources told her that some of Tesla's top contractors
did use e verify, a federal system employers can use
to check work authorization, but Julia's sources identified some subcontractors
that didn't use it. That's pretty typical for construction, but
it's an option for companies who are concerned about the
use of undocumented workers.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
Builders can require that their subcontractors use e verify. That's
often required up and down the chain of subcontractors on
military projects and other sensitive projects. That's not typical of
a project on a scale like Tesla's, where experts have
(14:12):
told me it just wouldn't be wouldn't be practical.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
According to the advocacy organization Workers Defense Project, the intensity
of the work also created some unsafe working conditions. The
organization spoke with about forty people who worked at the
Tesla site and found that construction workers there grappled with
a lack of personal protective gear and had to deal
with extreme heat and a high injury rate. In twenty
(14:37):
twenty one, a worker for a Tesla subcontractor died of
hyperthermia or abnormally high body temperature. In twenty twenty two,
OSHA cited the Tesla subcontractor for allegedly exposing workers to
high heat. The company contested the citation and reached a
formal settlement with OSHA the next year. Julia says that
(14:58):
of the workers she spoke with, Christie's experience fainting from
heatstroke was the most serious.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
Most of the workers that I spoke with did not
raise those types of issues. They did express concerns that
they weren't being paid as much as their peers who
were doing similar jobs as US citizens. That is a
common issue in the industry, and Workers Defense found widespread
(15:26):
claims of wage theft, which is where workers are not
being paid fairly or aren't being paid what they were promised.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
Sources told Julia that the proportion of undocumented workers at
the Tesla site wasn't actually that extreme when compared to
other Texas construction sites.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
They said that this project was very typical, no better,
no worse than the industry. The industry as a whole
relies a lot on undocumented workers.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
So why was it significant that these workers were undocumented
and we're working on Tesla's gigafactory.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
I think it's significant in that it's part of this
pattern we have seen of people who are advocating hardline
immigration policies not necessarily upholding those policies on their own projects,
and so I see this story as the latest example
(16:30):
of that.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
There's this contradiction between Musk's public rhetoric on immigration and
what's actually going on at his company's job sites. While
Musk's posts on x cast undocumented immigrants as criminals, his businesses,
like many others across the country, rely on their labor.
Workers on the ground have noted the discrepancy too.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
One worker told me he found himself asking why are
we here if he doesn't want tests. But this worker
ultimately concluded that must light so many other business people,
was willing to tolerate the presence of these workers because
(17:12):
he wanted cheap labor.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
It's a fundamental tension that complicates Trump's broader immigration agenda.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Undocumented workers play a really pivotal role in sectors across
our economy. If the US were to crack down at
the border, the way. Donald Trump has expressed that he
intends to. It would spell bid problems for construction, for agriculture,
(17:43):
for manufacturing. And I think that the case of Tesla
is just an interesting example of how companies all across
our economy really rely on these workers.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Julia says it's unlikely that Tesla or SpaceX will see
any wrecked ramifications for using undocumented laborers.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
I think that one thing that is striking about our
immigration system is there tends to be a lot of
emphasis on pursuing individuals who violate the law by crossing
the border without authorization. It's much less common to see
(18:24):
enforcement actions against companies that employ undocumented workers.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder.
This episode was produced by David Fox. It was edited
by Tracy Samuelson and Jeremy Keen. It was fact checked
by audren A Tapia and mixed and sound designed by
Alex Sugia. Special thanks to Angel Russio. Our senior producer
is Naomi Shaven. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Our
(18:55):
executive producer is Nicole Beamster. Bor Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's
head of Podcasts. If you liked this episode, make sure
to subscribe and review The Big Take wherever you listen
to podcasts. It helps people find the show. Thanks for listening.
We'll be back tomorrow.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news. Christy was in her
early fifties when she left her native Honduras for the US.
She told Bloomberg's Julia Love that she didn't have authorization
to work in the US, but after a few months
searching for work, she took a job as a cleaner
(00:23):
on a construction site in Texas in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Texas is hot. This site was very exposed to the
sun and the elements, especially in the early days, and
she had to watch long distances. She was logging up
to thirty thousand steps a day.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Christy is her first name. She asked that Bloomberg withhold
her last name for fear of reprisal. She said she
worked twelve hour shifts vacuuming, mopping floors, and scrubbing toilets
in the summer heat. Be Amaskaline that the temperatures reached
(01:07):
up to ninety eight degrees and even though there were
water stations, she says her bosses discouraged workers from using them.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
It will probably my superior. They discouraged that because they
didn't want workers to lose time using the restroom, and
so as a result, workers were struggling to stay properly hydrated.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
One day, Christy was vacuuming a staircase to clear dust
and debris. Or Christie says, the area wasn't ventilated, she
was sweating heavily. The vacuums she'd been given had a
short tube, so she was bending over to reach the ground.
(01:58):
The last thing she remembers standing up and everything going
darksas she woke up on a stretcher in a clinic
nearby to the news that she had suffered heat stroke.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
So sadly, these working conditions are common for undocumented workers
in the United States. They are some of the most
vulnerable workers in our economy. They faced greater risk if
they speak out about dangerous workplace conditions, and so as
(02:39):
a result, they often suffer more than other workers.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
But there's one aspect of Christie's story that Julia says
is unique.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
What's noteworthy about her story is the owner of the
construction project, Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla, who
has really rose to political power over the past year
with an anti immigrant message.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the big take from
Bloomberg News Today. On the show, an investigation into how
undocumented workers helped fuel the expansion of Tesla and SpaceX
in Texas, while Elon Musk advocated for a crackdown at
the border. One month into President Donald Trump's second term,
(03:36):
Elon Musk has been busy aggressively shrinking the size of
the federal government, targeting agencies like USAID and the Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau. After spending nearly three hundred million dollars
supporting Trump's presidential campaign, the billionaire CEO is now a
regular by Trump's side, but Bloomberg's Julia Love says for
(03:56):
most of his time in the public eye, Musk hasn't
been seen as a very political figure. As he's become
more conservative over the last few years, he's also become
more outspoken in his opposition to immigration. If we were
to chart the full arc of Elon Musk and US immigration,
where does that story really start?
Speaker 2 (04:16):
So he himself is an immigrant. He was born in
South Africa, and The Washington Post has reported that in
the early days of his career, when he was launching
one of his first startups, he himself was working without
authorization in the United States, and it was something that
(04:39):
his investors were concerned about. Musk has denied this on
X and through the years he's been a big advocate
for visas for highly skilled workers, the H one B
visa program. Tesla receives a lot of these visas for
engineers and other workers. Really in the past few years
(05:02):
that he has become so outspoken about the US Mexico
border and advancing these narratives that migrants are a threat
to public safety and that they're being used to dame
the election with little to no evidence. I think it
was in late twenty twenty three that he expressed concern
(05:24):
about what was happening to the border, and he traveled
to edele Pass, which is on the Texas stretch of
the border. And after that trip and all throughout twenty
twenty four, he became very outspoken about immigration.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Can you give us a sense of the kinds of
things that Musk was posting on X about immigration and
the lead up to the election. Yes.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
So, here's an example from February of twenty twenty four.
He wrote, illegals in a marriage had can get bank loans, mortgages, insurance, drivers' licenses,
free healthcare California and New York and in state college tuition.
What's the point of being a citizen if an illegal
(06:10):
gets all the benefits but doesn't pay taxes or do
Jerry duty. And then there's another tweet from March fifth,
in which he wrote, this administration is both importing voters
and creating a national security threat from unvetted illegal immigrants.
(06:30):
It is highly probable that the groundwork is being laid
for something far worse than nine to eleven just a
matter of time.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
These are incendiary posts. Did he have any evidence to
back these up?
Speaker 2 (06:42):
There were cases in which he would highlight an isolated
arrest of one migrant and kind of use that to
paint a picture that immigrants are dangerous, are threat to
public safety. There were other cases in which it is
especially the assertions of voter importation, in which he had
(07:03):
no evidence.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
How has that shift tracked with his move towards alloying
himself with President Trump.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Yeah, I think it's one of the issues where they
really come together, and I think that he has framed
it as one of the reasons why he felt like
Biden should not remain in office, that President Biden did
not have a handle on the border, you know, like
(07:32):
many on the right, and like Trump himself, he framed
the border as in a state of crisis and was
stressing the need for change.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Even before Musk took a sharp turn towards the right,
he had started to turn away from his longtime home
base of California and started moving his companies to Texas.
He broke ground on two major projects outside Austin, the
Tesla gigafactory and a SpaceX facility. Can you give us
a sense of the scale of the Tesla gigafactory he
(08:03):
built there?
Speaker 2 (08:04):
It's huge. It's about ten million square feet by some measures,
it's the second largest building in the world. And it
was a real challenge to find enough workers to build
this project. Workers on the project have told me that
staffing was constantly an issue.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
This is where Christie worked, the cleaner you heard from
at the top of the episode. She had been hired
by a Teslas subcontractor after she fainted from heatstroke on
the job. She says she had a dispute with her
supervisor about the incident and was fired. Christi eventually filed
a pair of complaints with OSHA, the Occupational Safety and
Health Administration, accusing the Tesla subcontractor of unsafe working conditions
(08:51):
and retaliation She's being represented by the Worker's Defense Project,
a Texas nonprofit that advocates for immigrant labors. Christy was
one of nine current and former undocumented workers at the
gigafactory who Julia spoke to. Julia also spoke with one
undocumented worker who helped build a SpaceX factory outside of Austin.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
In some cases, they showed me photos and videos that
they took at the site, and in other cases they
were accompanied by friends or family members who also echoed
details of their stories.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
What made you want to look into the citizenship status
of these workers?
Speaker 2 (09:33):
I thought it was interesting to explore whether must actions
reflected this rhetoric. He's been urging the government to do
more to vet the migrants that it lets in, and
I was curious to know if he was scrutinizing his
own operations on this front. And I think the construction
(09:58):
sector is an intro testing one to consider it, because
that labyrinth of contractors really does give owners a lot
of plausible deniability.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Tesla and SpaceX didn't respond to interview requests or detailed
questions for the story. Musk didn't respond to requests for
comments sent to him and his lawyer prior to publication.
Coming up, we'll look at how these undocumented workers came
to be hired at Tesla and SpaceX construction sites and
what their working conditions were like. When Tesla set out
(10:42):
to build a massive manufacturing facility in Austin, Texas, Bloomberg's
Julia Love says, the timeline for construction was extraordinarily ambitious.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
I've been told that a project like this might easily
take seven years to complete under normal construction timetables, and
Tesla began limited production at the facility a little over
a year after it began construction.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
Wow, so that's much faster than it would typically take. Absolutely,
and how did that play into their hiring decisions.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
Well, in order to meet this ambitious timetable, Tesla needed
a lot of workers, and I think that the way
in which the construction industry operates meant that they did
not necessarily have to inquire how their contractors were finding
(11:37):
those workers.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
Tesla didn't hire workers directly. They employed contractors, and those
contractors employed subcontractors, and Julia says to source workers, these
contractors coordinated with local affiliates of the plumbing, carpentry, and
electrical unions, but they also used other tactics.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Tesla's contractors, I'm told hi labor brokers, which brought in
workers from the Riodrand Valley, where workers often made less.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
Not all the workers that were hired to work at
the Tesla site had authorization to work in the United States,
and Julia says these immigrants played a pivotal role in
the construction of the gigafactory.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
They worked as cleaners, plumbers, welders, roofers, pretty much any
construction job that you can imagine.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
And it wasn't just the Tesla site in Austin. One
undocumented worker Julia spoke with helped build SpaceX's factory in Bastrop, Texas.
The companies themselves and Elon Musk, the man who leads them,
weren't directly involved in the contractors or their subcontractors hiring decisions,
but Julia says there's more they could have done to
(12:51):
enforce certain hiring standards.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
I am told that Tesla did have some instructions that
it communicated to its contractors. They stress to them the
importance of checking for authorization to work, running red testing,
things like that, but they did not monitor to ensure
that their contractors were complying with their wishes, and I
(13:19):
think this speaks to kind of a culture in the
construction industry that that's the contractor's business, that it's up
to the contractor to mine their own affairs.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Julia's sources told her that some of Tesla's top contractors
did use e verify, a federal system employers can use
to check work authorization, but Julia's sources identified some subcontractors
that didn't use it. That's pretty typical for construction, but
it's an option for companies who are concerned about the
use of undocumented workers.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
Builders can require that their subcontractors use e verify. That's
often required up and down the chain of subcontractors on
military projects and other sensitive projects. That's not typical of
a project on a scale like Tesla's, where experts have
(14:12):
told me it just wouldn't be wouldn't be practical.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
According to the advocacy organization Workers Defense Project, the intensity
of the work also created some unsafe working conditions. The
organization spoke with about forty people who worked at the
Tesla site and found that construction workers there grappled with
a lack of personal protective gear and had to deal
with extreme heat and a high injury rate. In twenty
(14:37):
twenty one, a worker for a Tesla subcontractor died of
hyperthermia or abnormally high body temperature. In twenty twenty two,
OSHA cited the Tesla subcontractor for allegedly exposing workers to
high heat. The company contested the citation and reached a
formal settlement with OSHA the next year. Julia says that
(14:58):
of the workers she spoke with, Christie's experience fainting from
heatstroke was the most serious.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
Most of the workers that I spoke with did not
raise those types of issues. They did express concerns that
they weren't being paid as much as their peers who
were doing similar jobs as US citizens. That is a
common issue in the industry, and Workers Defense found widespread
(15:26):
claims of wage theft, which is where workers are not
being paid fairly or aren't being paid what they were promised.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
Sources told Julia that the proportion of undocumented workers at
the Tesla site wasn't actually that extreme when compared to
other Texas construction sites.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
They said that this project was very typical, no better,
no worse than the industry. The industry as a whole
relies a lot on undocumented workers.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
So why was it significant that these workers were undocumented
and we're working on Tesla's gigafactory.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
I think it's significant in that it's part of this
pattern we have seen of people who are advocating hardline
immigration policies not necessarily upholding those policies on their own projects,
and so I see this story as the latest example
(16:30):
of that.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
There's this contradiction between Musk's public rhetoric on immigration and
what's actually going on at his company's job sites. While
Musk's posts on x cast undocumented immigrants as criminals, his businesses,
like many others across the country, rely on their labor.
Workers on the ground have noted the discrepancy too.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
One worker told me he found himself asking why are
we here if he doesn't want tests. But this worker
ultimately concluded that must light so many other business people,
was willing to tolerate the presence of these workers because
(17:12):
he wanted cheap labor.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
It's a fundamental tension that complicates Trump's broader immigration agenda.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Undocumented workers play a really pivotal role in sectors across
our economy. If the US were to crack down at
the border, the way. Donald Trump has expressed that he
intends to. It would spell bid problems for construction, for agriculture,
(17:43):
for manufacturing. And I think that the case of Tesla
is just an interesting example of how companies all across
our economy really rely on these workers.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Julia says it's unlikely that Tesla or SpaceX will see
any wrecked ramifications for using undocumented laborers.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
I think that one thing that is striking about our
immigration system is there tends to be a lot of
emphasis on pursuing individuals who violate the law by crossing
the border without authorization. It's much less common to see
(18:24):
enforcement actions against companies that employ undocumented workers.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder.
This episode was produced by David Fox. It was edited
by Tracy Samuelson and Jeremy Keen. It was fact checked
by audren A Tapia and mixed and sound designed by
Alex Sugia. Special thanks to Angel Russio. Our senior producer
is Naomi Shaven. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Our
(18:55):
executive producer is Nicole Beamster. Bor Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's
head of Podcasts. If you liked this episode, make sure
to subscribe and review The Big Take wherever you listen
to podcasts. It helps people find the show. Thanks for listening.
We'll be back tomorrow.
Hosts And Creators
Sarah Holder
Saleha Mohsin
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