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