Tesla Inc. will give most hourly workers at its Nevada gigafactory a roughly 10% pay increase starting in January, CNBC reported late Monday.
Citing internal materials it obtained, CNBC said the hourly wages of most workers at the Sparks, Nev. battery plant. will increase from $20 to $22 per hour at the low end and from $30.65 to $34.50 per hour at the high end.
Tesla TSLA,
did not immediately respond to a request for confirmation or comment.
The wage increases may be part of an effort to temper union support at the facility. The United Auto Workers said last month they were launching an effort to unionize workers at Tesla, Toyota TM.
and several other automakers. Toyota and Honda announced wage increases for their non-union workers in the US in early November, shortly after the UAW settled the strike with the Big Three automakers, which delivered significant wage increases.
“To all the autoworkers working without the benefits of a union, now it’s your turn,” UAW President Shawn Fain said in a November video.
Tesla and its CEO, Elon Musk, have strongly opposed the union efforts. In 2019, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Tesla unlawfully discouraged its auto workers in Fremont, California, from forming a union. In November, the NLRB rejected a union claim that Tesla illegally fired workers in Buffalo, New York, in retaliation for efforts to unionize.
Tesla is currently in the middle of a labor dispute with unions in Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark.
Tesla shares are up about 105% year to date, compared to the S&P 500’s SPX gain of 23%.