Elon Musk’s Super PAC Hit With Class Action Lawsuit Over Treatment Of Workers

America PAC, the PAC set up by billionaire Elon Musk, has been hit with a class action lawsuit from multiple canvassers who allege that they were shorted on their pay and threatened by the group that hired them. They say in the lawsuit that they were promised an hourly wage when they took the job, only to later find out that they would only be paid based on the number of doors they knocked on. Furthermore, reports from the last few days have claimed that workers were abused and lied to about who they were actually working for. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains what’s happening.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Elon Musk's America Pac, along with the group that they outsourced part of their canvassing to a company called Blitz Canvassing. They've now been hit both of them with a class action lawsuit from the canvassers that they had hired, where the plaintiffs in the lawsuit are alleging that they were not only hired under false pretenses, were not told who they'd be working for, but also that they were promised hourly wages when they signed up for the job. That later turned into performance based pay. Meaning if you didn't knock on X number of doors, which they said was about a thousand doors per week, which is completely unrealistic, then they didn't get paid. Also, they alleged that they were told that all of their expenses would be reimbursed because you know, even though Elon Musk is on and off, again, the richest man in the world, he wasn't paying for their hotels or flights as they had been told would happen. So let me read you this.

The plaintiffs alleged, they were hired under the pretense. They would be paid an hourly wage, but once onboarded were told their pay would actually depend on how many doors they knocked, significantly jeopardizing the amount they thought they would earn. According to the report, the canvasers are also suing over a failure to reimburse business expenses and for allegedly being provided inaccurate wage statements. This comes after separate reporting that canvassers said they were abused and overworked being threatened, that they wouldn't be compensated for their hotel rooms and airfare if they didn't meet wildly inflated work quotas like knocking 1000 doors a week. At least one of them said they weren't even told the job would involve canvassing for Trump and Republicans or on behalf of Musk. When they applied all of these allegations provide context for other reports that some of the door knockers working with blitz canvassing had resorted to fabricating data with GPS spoofing to the point that up to 25% of their voter contacts in the battleground states of Arizona and Nevada, Nevada have been faked.

So what's funny about this to me, and I love how this, uh, report actually kind of tied it all together, was that we've been getting bits and pieces of reports about how bad this operation has been since the start, right? Like people spoofing GPS to make it seem like they knocked on doors that they never knocked on. And of course that is a big blow to the Trump campaign. So when you take that, like why would they lie about the doors they knocked on? And Elon Musk admitted at the time that if we found out people did this, they would not be paid for those doors. So he, by making that statement admitted that yes, they're being paid by the door instead of by the hour. That lends more credence to this lawsuit. And it explains why Musk came out and made that statement, even though now it's gonna hurt him in court.

And of course this all comes back to the Trump campaign. Why didn't you just do it yourself? Why did you outsource this to Elon Musk, A man who knows nothing about this, this is not something he's ever done before. But you think just because he has a lot of money and because he's endorsed Donald Trump, that oh, he must be a smart guy, right? Well, apparently not. Apparently there are even limits to what Elon Musk can do. And these canvassers, the ones who have filed this lawsuit, they've got a pretty solid case. I'm not gonna say it's airtight, but I am gonna say this looks like a very winnable lawsuit for them. And I hope that they drag America Pac and this other group blitz canvassing through the coals if what they are alleging is in fact true.