Elon Musk smacked down for violating free speech pillar.

In 2023, Elon Musk managed to define himself as the cartoon villain of American capitalism: destroying the town square of Twitter, amplifying white supremacist and antisemitic voices, even denying Ukraine satellite service in the middle of the Russian onslaught.

As 2024 begins, Musk continues his villain role, this time as the target of a National Labor Relations Board complaint for violating employees’ rights at SpaceX. Musk responded with a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the NLRB’s action. But Musk’s beef is not really with the agency; it’s with the federal right that Congress passed and the agency is merely enforcing.

Musk can’t believe that employees actually have the right to speak out against their own CEO, as they did at SpaceX. Indeed, speech rights at work are generally quite limited. But at a time of increased attention to workers’ rights, Musk managed to violate the most important but least well-known workplace right in America: the right to talk to co-workers about working conditions. And in doing so, he inadvertently illustrated a path forward for workers and democracy.

The SpaceX saga started in May 2022, with a media report of a sexual harassment settlement involving a flight attendant who worked on SpaceX’s corporate jet and Musk himself. After Musk joked about the report on Twitter, several employees drafted a letter to senior managers about the need to take issues like sexual harassment more seriously, as part of creating a truly inclusive work environment. The letter got them fired.

Unlike former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s serial lawbreaking, this was not union organizing that Musk was trying to shut down. Indeed, the SpaceX employees were careful to avoid the perception that this was a nascent attempt to organize a union.

But the same law that protects union organizing—the National Labor Relations Act—also protects workers acting together for “mutual aid or protection,” whether or not there’s a union in the picture. That’s what the SpaceX employees were doing in trying to get their employer to take sexual harassment seriously.

The main reason Congress put this right in the National Labor Relations Act was to protect union organizing. The idea is that workers need to feel comfortable talking to one another about working conditions before they reach the question of what to do about it.

But the reality is that many workers don’t feel comfortable talking to co-workers for fear of retaliation, and so many union organizing efforts never get off the ground.

And even if unions never materialize, you still need co-workers talking to each other to improve conditions at work. This is true whether it’s SpaceX engineers in California or Waffle House servers in North Carolina. After all, talking to co-workers about things that don’t seem right or people in the workplace to watch out for—it’s how people surface problems and consider acting to make things better. Without that exchange of information, problems fester.

Whether it’s sexual harassment, equal pay, or health and safety, the ability of workers to exercise power and enforce their rights depends on their ability to talk to co-workers about issues at work without fear of retaliation.

But a right is only meaningful if it is enforced. And right now, the only way to enforce the right to talk to co-workers is to go to the NLRB. There is no mechanism for individual employees to sue their employer for violating this right. And the NLRB’s funding has been frozen since 2014—effectively a 25 percent budget cut over the last 10 years, accounting for inflation.

In forthcoming research for the National Institute for Workers’ Rights, we found that when the NLRB does take up these claims, workers are successful in nearly two-thirds of cases. But there’s reason to believe that—like many areas of workplace law—there are many more legitimate claims that are never vindicated.

Strengthening this right is not only important for improving workers’ lives: It’s also important for democracy. Ask Alexis de Tocqueville: The beating heart of American democracy is groups of people coming together to try to improve their lives and communities.

And though co-workers may not agree on abortion, gender identity, and race in schools, they might agree that their company can afford to pay its workers a few bucks an hour more when they’re paying top executives millions. Or that the boss can figure out a way to let folks take bathroom breaks while on the factory floor.

But they can’t find that common ground (the boss sucks!) or that common project (let’s make things better!) if they’re afraid to talk to each other about it. That’s why the SpaceX saga matters: Because the underlying issue—what happens when you speak up at work?—is fundamental to the struggle for workplace justice and a stronger democracy. And strengthening the right to talk to co-workers is a critical but underappreciated component of that struggle.