Yes, but Tesla will have a strong argument that that is not what happened, as layoffs in this space have been planned since before union efforts. Tesla has been slowly getting rid of their “labeling teams” by attrition, as they no longer need the human labelers. This article involving 200 such layoffs from June comes to mind.

It’s unfortunate that anyone got fired, but there’s little to show that there is actual correlation between the 18 people who were trying to jumpstart a union and the layoffs. This is especially true with data labeling in general - most of it is low-skill work, and most firms using data labeling to feed neural nets use temp or contract workers because data labeling is a means to an end, not a permanent solution. It’s typically only used to stand-up neural nets, with the goal being to get away from manual data labeling and have computers do it automatically