EDITORIAL: Labor leader needs lesson on First Amendment

While Kamala Harris hides from unscripted events, Donald Trump can’t stop talking off the cuff. On Monday, the former president gave an interview to Elon Musk on his social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

During the event, which was marred by delays, Mr. Trump praised Mr. Musk for taking an aggressive stand against unions. He called Mr. Musk “the cutter” and went on to say, “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 OK, you’re all gone. You’re all gone. Every one of you is gone.’ ” In response, Mr. Musk laughed and said, “Yeah.”

Whether such comments benefit Mr. Trump politically is a matter of debate. But the remarks were hardly groundbreaking. Yet on Tuesday, the UAW filed federal “labor charges” against Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk, arguing that the exchange violated laws against worker intimidation. The allegations, according to CNN, claim that the two men “interfered with, restrained or coerced employees” who were exercising their right to organize against the company, “suggesting he would fire employees engaged in protected concerted activity, including striking.”

The UAW’s move, of course, is a stunt intended to harass Mr. Musk because he owns Tesla, a non-union automaker. But at no point in the breathless reporting on this topic has anybody broached the obvious: Any interpretation of federal labor law that makes it illegal for Mr. Musk, Mr. Trump or anybody else to speak their piece about workers and unions is patently unconstitutional.

UAW President Shawn Fain has inadvertently highlighted the extent to which the Biden administration will ignore the Constitution to advance the agenda of Big Labor, one of its largest benefactors. The National Labor Relations Board in recent years has taken to reinterpreting laws in an effort to “effectively strip employers’ speech and property rights,” The Wall Street Journal noted last year.

In a case that’s eerily similar to the UAW complaint against Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump, labor interests in 2023 filed charges against Amazon CEO Andy Jassy for comments he made in a New York Times interview in which he argued his company’s workers would be better off without a union.

These “charges” — against Mr. Trump, Mr. Musk and Mr. Jassy — are absurd. The NLRB should reject them out of hand or face embarrassment in the federal courts. You can search high and low through the Bill of Rights and you won’t find an exception to the First Amendment for speech that labor leaders would like to silence.