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Tesla Just Fired Hundreds Of Workers (mercurynews.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Bay Area Newsgroup:
Tesla fired hundreds of workers this week, including engineers, managers and factory workers, even as the company struggles to expand its manufacturing and product line... The company said this week's dismissals were the result of a company-wide annual review, and insisted they were not layoffs. Some workers received promotions and bonuses, and the company expects to hire for the "vast majority" of new vacancies, a spokesman said. "As with any company, especially one of over 33,000 employees, performance reviews also occasionally result in employee departures," a spokesman said. "Tesla is continuing to grow and hire new employees around the world."
"Tesla has a hearing before the National Labor Relations Board in November for charges that company supervisors and security guards harassed workers distributing union literature," reports the Bay Area Newsgroup, adding that "Openly pro-union workers were among those fired this week. Some believe they were targeted."
Tesla denies this, and says that they've generally boosted morale this week -- by rewarding higher-performing employees.
"Tesla has a hearing before the National Labor Relations Board in November for charges that company supervisors and security guards harassed workers distributing union literature," reports the Bay Area Newsgroup, adding that "Openly pro-union workers were among those fired this week. Some believe they were targeted."
Tesla denies this, and says that they've generally boosted morale this week -- by rewarding higher-performing employees.
Are these firings the result of stack ranking? If so, why would anyone want to work there.
It was true 100 years ago and it's true today, the only way for workers to get a fair deal is to organize as a group. Let's see how Elon Musk deals with this earth bound reality. Maybe he can get Mars declared a "right to work" state.
You don't get ahead through education. You get ahead by being in a union. A week educated wage slave is still a wage slave. A unionized wage slave at least belongs to an organization that can shut down the company. Guess which gets better paid in the long run. Meritocracy works until you have coded yourself out of a job, at which point you are too specialized, too old, too expensive to be a credible wage slave for the next job.
Stick with the union.
This would NEVER happen in a UNION shop.
You say that like it's an inherently good thing.
Everyone would get raises.
Including the people who don't deserve them.
Everyone would get promotions.
No. You can't promote everyone.
Only the less experienced people would get terminated due to budget constraints.
Again: This protects the incompetent and the disruptive personnel and brings down the entire workforce. A bad worker--regardless of seniority--is a bad worker, and should be gotten rid of, not rewarded.
I want my car designed by the people with the most time in service, not the most education, knowledge, etc.
Really? You want your car designed by the guy who knows he can't get fired, and has no reason to do any better than "good enough"?
I've been a member of 3 different unions and I've worked with somewhere around 150 different locals in over 50 jurisdictions in the US and Canada. In Washington DC, I had a jouneyman show up drunk. I reported him to the steward, he was sober the next day, but drunk again on the 3rd. I cut him from my crew.... and he was just reassigned to another crew and allowed to keep working (while drunk at 8am).
Protecting all workers at all costs is bad for business, bad for production, and bad for the other workers who watch incompetence be rewarded.
4. If they were indeed slackers, why were they hired in the first place?
They didn’t put “I'm a slacker” on their resume, I guess.
I think you are mixing types of people. The Politically astute person knows hows to deal with the organization and gets promoted from it. Normally the guys who are spreading out Union and demanding to be Unionized are often under performers who doesn't realize how much they are under performing, then their actions to try to get the company unionized, is only cutting their productivity down further.
Why did person A get a raise and I didn't, this is unfair I demand more....
Often person A may not have been working as many hours, but the hours they do work are more productive, their personally may not have gotten in the way of the productivity of other workers, and the extra money they will give him, will entice him to stay and be an asset to the company. While the guy complaining usually is getting in the way of other employees (otherwise why would he know about person A raise), spending time comparing what others do vs focusing on doing the best job himself.
Also oddly enough the top performer isn't the one that gets promoted, because the under performer may be better suited at the different job. So the guy who is good at dealing with the internal politics, knowing when to push and when to hold back and deal with it, may just be the right type of person to be a manager, whos job isn't to create output, but protect those who do from having to deal with the red tape.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
First of all you, you seem to have missed the primary function of unions which is to make a fair share of the wealth generation go back to the workers, not merely the capitalists. Working conditions, health and safety, working hours and so on have always been secondary struggles where the workers demand some other form of compensation than wages. In that respect unions are failing horribly and apart from the minimum wage - that in real dollars is no higher than in the 1950s - the government is not going to fix.
It's no doubt that if you're a struggling business the unions can be a burden but if they were generally driving companies out of business the richest 15% wouldn't be making more and more money while everyone else loses. What you're seeing is a system where the money is extracted whenever the business is profitable, then makes everyone else take the burden when it's unprofitable. The US has managed to create something worse than social welfare, it's corporate welfare where you take from the tax payers and give to the corporations.
For example, why was your future retirement income to the company's future? Put that money into a pension fund when you do work, if the company goes tits up or you change jobs or lose your job it stops accumulating but it's yours. Or at least a potential share if you make it to retirement age. I mean they're back in business now aren't they? Making money again, which is extracted until the next crisis when the coffers again will be mysteriously empty. And they've done a great frame job when people like you blame the unions for that, nothing like 1%ers making the other 99% blame each other.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Political astuteness does actually have some value to the company if the person has some ethics.
love is just extroverted narcissism
"Back then" companies were happy to exploit workers within an inch of their lives - and beyond - if it made them a few more dollars in profit. That hasn't changed, so neither has the need for unions.
Tech workers are one of the few labor pools where employers have been caught colluding to keep wages down, and yet they are typically against unions because it cuts against their libertarian tendencies and a significant percentage of them fall prey to the Dunning Kruger effect which keeps them from recognizing their mediocrity. So when they get passed over for a promotion, or someone else's project gets greenlighted, they blame diversity efforts, or office politics rather than a union.
So life is not fair, and you're going to blame somenody.
It is commendable that your dad thought doing a good job was more important than getting maxing out his work/pay ratio. But the company he worked for was almost certainly trading as little pay as possible for as much work as possible, and union or no, (if I'm not in management there) I'm not going to hold it against workers for approaching that trade with the same level of self-interest.
So, you don't think the Unions had a duty to my parents and their retirements to demand a fully funded pension fund? I do..
You don't think the Unions didn't make the financial condition of many of the major companies untenable at least partially due to the demands of their Unions? I do.
That management gets paid what they do has little to do with the survival or failure of a business. Usually a CEO's salary amounts to pennies on the dollar to the in the trenches worker, yet your ilk want to make some kind of moral argument about how unfair it is that one person gets so much and the new guy gets so little of the company's revenue.
Personally I'm tired of the arguments born out of class envy, socialistic politics and anti capitalist clap trap. Like it or not, this country has EQUAL opportunity codified in our laws but we DON'T have equal outcome guarantees. You cannot measure opportunity by measuring outcome and you cannot measure what's fair by outcome either.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
lolwut. So you hate unions and think they are unnecessary, but at the same time hate them for not being more powerful because they couldn't force the company to better fund their pensions?
No, I'm faulting them because they didn't TRY. The focus wasn't on funding the pension fund, but garnering more retirement benefits that the company obviously couldn't' afford. Don't try and tell me otherwise, I went to the union meetings with my parents, I remember what the Union bosses were telling the crowds and I remember my Dad complaining about this very thing way back then.
If the company can't exist without wage slavery, it doesn't deserve to exist. And what part of "unions accept massive cutbacks while executives take golden parachutes" did I stutter on? When was the last time you saw top company executives agree to work for $10 an hour to get the company back on track?
How's this relevant to what the Unions did or didn't do? Why is this class envy thing always seen as justification for making people who get paid more somehow bad actors? But to answer your question, I've heard of CEO's taking huge pay cuts in struggling companies, but this is all PR with zero substance anyway. I've not seen a company go bankrupt because they paid a CEO too much money. Have you? Citation please?
There it is. You sir, are a temporarily embarrassed millionaire.
Wow, that's a leap! So now I'm embarrassed by rich people? Seriously? I'm not embarrassed by them, I don't envy them and I would like to be rich like them. I have some very wealthy friends, they got their money by working hard for it, most rich people do just that. There is NOTHING to be ashamed about if you are rich and you didn't cheat or steal your way into the money. If you think I'm embarrassed by rich people, or would be embarrassed to be one of them is stupid.
If you don't have equal opportunity.
And there it is, marxism in all it's glory. Having an equal chance, equal opportunity does NOT produce equal outcomes.
Have you ever watched the 100 yard dash? All the runners start at the same distance from the finish line, run on the same track and must start at the same time. Only one wins. They all run the same distance, the one that gets to the finish line first, wins. Why does only one win when all were afforded the same opportunity? Because each runner had varying skills, training drive and ability and so one could run faster. It's the same in life. Opportunity is by law, equal, skill, drive and ability vary, so outcome varies.
In your world, you think equal opportunity means everybody should get a participation trophy, just for entering the race. They don't have to run a step, train, have any ability or develop any skills, they get the same trophy as everybody else. I ask you, why run? Why Train? Why try? If you get the same thing as everybody else, who cares. But that's what Marx says we should do, that's what socialism says should happen.... AND exactly why those systems fail... Nobody tries..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101