Elon Musk says Tesla, SpaceX will honor Juneteenth as a US holiday – Roadshow [CNET]

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said both the companies he heads will honor Juneteenth as if it were an official US holiday.

Juneteenth is henceforth considered a US holiday at Tesla & SpaceX

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 19, 2020

Musk tweeted Friday around 10:00 a.m. PT that the date celebrating the end of slavery in the US is “henceforth considered a US holiday” at both companies. In a follow-up tweet, Musk clarified that this will “require the use of a paid-time-off day,” like with other holidays at the company.

An email surfaced via Twitter earlier this morning from Valerie Workman, Tesla’s head of human resources in the US, declaring Tesla workers could take Juneteenth off as an excused absence without pay. However, according to the tweet, the email arrived after some workers at Tesla’s plant in Fremont, California had already arrived for work.

The automaker did not immediately respond to Roadshow’s request for comment on Musk’s remarks.

Workers at the plant had already planned a protest to highlight Juneteenth’s importance and explicitly called for a statement from Musk. We’ll need to wait and see if the CEO has anything additional to share following his tweet.

Workman has, however, penned an open letter speaking to the realities of being Black in the US. In it, she writes, “Fearing for the lives of my husband and sons is a constant nagging undercurrent that I suppress so that I can go about my day (just as my mother, my grandmother and my great-grandmother learned to live with this fact of life).”

She continued, “Despite being a proponent of bringing your whole self to work, I never discuss this part of my life in the office.”