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Tesla Employees Detail How They Were Fired, Claim Dismissals Were Not Performance Related (cnbc.com)
New submitter joshtops shares a CNBC report: Tesla is trying to disguise layoffs by calling the widespread terminations performance related, allege several current and former employees. On Friday, the San Jose Mercury News first reported that Tesla had dismissed an estimated 400 to 700 employees. That number represents between 1 and 2 percent of its entire workforce. But one former employee, citing internal information shared by a manager, said the total number fired is higher than 700 at this point. Most of the people let go from Tesla so far have been from its motors business, said people familiar with the matter. They were not from other initiatives like Tesla Powerwall, which is helping restore electricity to the residents of Puerto Rico now. The mass firings, which affected Tesla employees across the U.S., had begun by the weekend of Oct. 7 and continued even after the initial news report, sources said. Among those whose jobs were terminated in this phase, some were given severance packages quickly while others are still waiting on separation agreements. Some terminated employees told CNBC they were informed via email or a phone call "without warning," and told not to come into work the next day. The company also dismissed other employees without specifying a given performance issue, according to these people. "Seems like performance has nothing to do with it," one Tesla employee told CNBC under the condition of anonymity. "Those terminated were generally the highest paid in their position," this person said, suggesting that the firings were driven by cost-cutting. That assessment was echoed by several others, including three employees fired from Tesla during this latest wave.
Unlike traditional automakers, Tesla does not have a union. Yet.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Illusory superiority is something we probably all have mentally: We all think we're above average employees, when obviously that's impossible.
One thing I've noticed working at a few major companies is that nobody ever really gets bad performance reviews: Instead, they all range from satisfactory to excellent. But in reality, those who get satisfactory are getting bad reviews, it's just more polite to NOT say "you stink".
Performance is PRETEXT used to fire undesirables before stock vestment. Especially if they're let go all at the same time!
Your opinion is being played for a fool.
This is systemic bullshit in our industry.
Or the post office...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
"Those terminated were generally the highest paid in their position," this person said, suggesting that the firings were driven by cost-cutting.
It's not trolling to mod off-topic posts to -1. Complain about it on a climate change story, it has no place here. Yeah yeah I know, "it's too important, we have to spread the word everywhere" says every zealot about every issue. Keep it on topic. If your screed has nothing to do with the story, then it should be modded down to -1, every time.
Yes, underperforming on a work to cost ratio... The higher you get paid, the more profit you have to make..
Tesla has how much profit? Um... Can we say nearly nothing?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
... especially in an at-will state, it's always legally in your best interest to not state a reason for the termination. For an at-will state, you are often not required to provide a reason, and if you do provide one it can come back to bite you in a lawsuit if they can show evidence otherwise.
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
Maybe I'm lucky, but I've generally worked in places where they've never fired anyone for poor performance. Like the summary suggests, firings are usually based on salary and it's just a dumb HR thing. Are performance-based firings really a thing?
Just to be clear, I don't work exclusively with rockstars either. There are plenty of mediocre performers. But I've never experienced having someone get so bad at their job that they had to be removed.
There's no easy fix either...you basically have to not be the top guy on the salary spreadsheet when they decide to cut.
you have to pay unemployment for any reason. And yes, that means some people who don't desperately need it will get it. It also means your wages won't get depressed by them competing with you in the job market.
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This is a difference without a distinction, as they say.
When will people learn that money is a measure of resource allocation? These people represented misallocated resources.
That being said, I really wonder why companies cannot just reduce people's pay, and either let them stay on or leave of their own accord.
Technically, your post is off-topic too - just sayin'.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Some terminated employees told CNBC they were informed via email or a phone call "without warning," and told not to come into work the next day.
I'm fairly certain they didn't throw their belongings in the trash. But otherwise, yes, that's generally how it happens.
#notmypresident !!!!!
#actually...
Let's test my theory:
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I need that Szechuan sauce, Morty!
Because robots. Please stick around to assemble and train the robots....
https://electrek.co/2017/04/25/tesla-model-3-robot-production-line-pictures/
Some co's fire the bottom of the stack, others fire the top. This suggests a madness to the method.
Table-ized A.I.
I used to work at GE, they did occasionally try to fire someone for poor performance. It was always a major hassle documenting the reasons, discussing the problem with the employee, etc. But it did happen once in a while when the person was truly a non-performer and sometimes resulted in a lawsuit against the company.
Much more common was a RIF - Reduction In Force. Those involved a large number of people (like this one at Tesla) and usually effected older employees, poor performers, and people with the misfortune to be in a poor performing business group. Yea, it's illegal to layoff older employees in order to cut salaries so they always threw in a few younger employees to make it look like a mix.
There were usually a few really poor performers around before a RIF. We called them "canaries", because like a canary in a coal mine, as long as they were around you knew you were safe.
The NLRB doesn’t just up and file complaints on their own. Someone has to walk in the door and file a complaint against Tesla claiming that their termination violated the NLRA. The fact that a number of the people targeted were alleged to be attempting to form a union would definitely be something the NLRB would get involved with. However, if the firings were performance based, or even cost-cutting measures, that’s perfectly legal.
The NLRB would only get involved if one of the people fired was attempting to form a union, OR they were discussing the terms and conditions of employment and that was the reason they were fired.
The DFEH and EEOC would only get involved if someone was fired because of their race, gender, or disability, or if someone was fired for sticking up for, or assisting, someone being targeted for reasons enforced by those agencies.
The California labor commission would get involved if Tesla didn’t pay final wages immediately upon being fired, was paying men and women differently for substantively similar work, or imposed a rule preventing employees from discussing wages or working conditions. Based on the blurb, Tesla’s going to end up paying some nasty fines if people are still waiting on their final pay.
I’m not sure if it would be the labor commission or the employment development department (unemployment office) who would investigate if Tesla was violating the WARN Act, or its California equivalent.
California is an at-will state, so with very few exceptions you can be fired (or quit) at any time for any, or even no, reason. Your boss could come in with a massive hangover and fire you for talking at a normal volume, which was too loud for them. They could fire you because they don’t like the color of your shoelaces.
I agree, that the EEOC, DFEH, NLRB, and similar should be advocates for the employee instead of “neutral fact finders.” Companies like Tesla effectively have unlimited resources if any of those fired employee sues, so can get away with things simply because you and I can’t afford to pay for a legal battle that could drag on for years. However, I can wish for that all I want, but the reality is that they aren’t advocates for employees. Unless you or I can provide a smoking gun email or a metric shit tonne of circumstantial evidence all pointing in the same direction, we can basically expect those agencies to politely listen to our story and then say there’s nothing they can do.
The truth is that the Big Three automakers were (and are) unable to respond to competitive stresses caused by places with lower wages being able to export into the US market. The lame management was a given - though there were only three things the management could do:
1) Cut costs sufficiently to compete - I rate this as nigh-impossible as a practical matter, as things like transport, raw materials, and infrastructure cost more here, too, and the automakers couldn't remake the whole economy all on their own. That said, this is where unions hurt the most.
Unions are rather shortsighted beasts and they cause more harm to manufacturing workers in the long run than they help. If you take a year-long or five year view, they are great. Look over a career's length, and the evidence is equivocal. Over 100 years, the union will kill any manufacturing business dead. The objective of the union is to maximize return for the union members and to control/limit access to the labor market in that industry in the interest of maintaining scarcity toward maximizing union member return. This is rarely congruent with the interests of the manufacturer, most obviously in times of competitive stress. Unions are great at getting workers stuff when the going is good, but when it is rough, they are unwilling to give anything back. Unions most typically force the manufacturer to reach the edge of bankruptcy and total dissolution before the union is willing to negotiate in good faith and with urgency, and by then it is much too late.
You need only look at what happened to US Steel, if the automakers aren't convincing enough.
2) Diversify - which was done, but was insufficent to stop the bleeding. Think, say, investments in Mazda by Ford, or in Isuzu/Suzuki by GM (Geo line).
3) Push their political masters to restrict trade to protect their market. This is what was ultimately done. You didn't think all those foreign car makers built plants in the US for their health, did you? They were compelled to. All that free trade talk is bullshit once your ox starts getting gored.
So, those who blame the unions and blame the management have lots of details to pick from to support their view. My view is that we should just accept that free trade is a phantom and stop pretending that we don't have a corporatist, protectionist regime. It's the only way the old-fashioned US economy works on a macroscopic level. Even the internet companies are starting to feel the pinch and are going to become part of this old school economy before long.
Why is so much of politics today pretending we don't believe in what we actually do believe in?
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Exhibit A why fans of any pop culture phenomenon are retarded.
Please mod into oblivion.
All of us.
If it does, it is only for the shareholders.
what about have more EU like rights in the usa?
> Global warming is real.
Unless declared integer.
Apple hires 700 new engineers.
"Slashdot is supposed to be a place free of censorship and it is time that the censorship of global warming skeptics stops."
You must be new around here. We "censor" ourselves. Majority rules on Slashdot.
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And I'd be fine getting modded down for it, I certainly wouldn't bitch and moan in other /. stories because some mod gave a -1 to my off-topicness.
And I'd be fine getting modded down for it, I certainly wouldn't bitch and moan in other /. stories because some mod gave a -1 to my off-topicness.
Sure, I get it - I was just injecting some humor. Things get mis-modded all the time here and it can be annoying -- mostly so when "flamebait" or "troll" is applied simply because the moderator disagrees with the opinions (or facts) in the post -- and this happens a lot with certain topics. Such mis-moderation injects the moderator's viewpoint into the thread - which makes it commentary, not moderation. Also annoying is when a post is modded "off-topic" when it's topic-adjacent or otherwise weirdly connected (often in an attempt at some humor) which shows a lack of imagination on the part of the moderator.
In this case, the original post was way off-topic and I would have modded it as such, instead of troll.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
When I mod, I judge whether the Gentle Reader would benefit from reading shit posts like yours.
-1 Offtopic, Irrelevant, Troll, Flamebait
Fuck you and your claim of censorship and your tribalism, asshole.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Maybe they started using the old GE strategy of firing th bottom x% of the workforce as a matter of preventative maintenance?
"Stack ranking, also referred to as forced ranking, where managers across a company are required to rank all of their employees on a bell curve, has been a controversial management technique since then GE CEO Jack Welch popularized it in the 1980s.
"Only a small percentage of employees, typically about 10%, can be designated as top performers. Meanwhile, a set number must be labeled as low performers and are often fired or pushed out, giving the system the popular nickname "rank and yank."
Putting on my cynical hat here... although the laws vary by state, it looks really bad if you as an employer were to fire employees for reasons like "low performance" and then neglect to attempt to fill those positions. The former employees would then have a really strong case for unemployment benefits (which they might not otherwise be entitled to if fired with cause, but again, that varies by location), or maybe even wrongful termination if they can make a convincing case that their former employer used bogus reasons to avoid calling the terminations "layoffs."
But, there's nothing that says you (the employer) actually have to fill those openings... just leave them open, interview someone every once in a while to put up appearances, and you can then make a claim like "well, we've been interviewing, but haven't been unable to find any good candidates" without ever actually filling the position that you want to cut.
Yeah, yeah, it's just a metaphor, but it speaks volumes with respect to thought processes.
Never use a series 9,000 on a Rick. (Nothing wrong with a bit of humor.)
I never thought of that glass thing - I gotta use it!
The FULL truth is that firm have the short, medium and long term goal of maximizing profit, even at the cost of being horrible to worker if needed. You forget the context in which union were born : as a counter balance to that. The result in the end were labor laws which were not done at the behest of firm , since they could not care less and came to even build horrible stuff like company scripts, child labor, not care about worker protection (what if a few worker are mangled by a machine "he, whatever") etc... Since then it has been a push/pull between firms and union. Sometimes the balance get in favor of union, sometimes not. But even in countries with load of social protection and strong union (think germany) it has NEVER been so out of whack that it destroyed manufacture. And they definitively caused more good than harm in the long run you specify. The reason US steel is dying , is because as a whole it is too expansive to produce, even if you paid worker zero and enslaved them. The reason is that steel production is resource intensive, and the major cost is not worker for a steel mill, it is the matter and the energy by a major factor. That is why even in the US, mini steel mill which use scrap steel and arc furnace produce cheap enough that they are profitable. Furthermore the major problem of the steel worker is that it is VERY easy to automate a lot of steel production. The union have NADA to do with that. Nowadays you can per worker count around 1500 tons of steel produced per year. And then the cost of steel dropped through the basement, the amount rose over capacity etc... NONE of those problem have anything to do with union, unless you are one of those person which pretend that getting paid under the cost of living is an option.
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I'm no tree-hugger, but I'd mod you down for posting anything that's OFF TOPIC. This isn't a global warming story, it's a Tesla story.
-jcr
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I'm agreeing with the above post. I keep saying in my last two posts on the Muskovites, I'm guessing they can't pay their bills. And if you can't make payroll, that's a big legal hit. Better to avoid the problem than be hit by mandatory liability.
Tracy Johnson
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BT
I try hard not to call people names but for you I will make an exception. You are an idiot.
If you want to rail against global warming claims, fine. Take the time to research ocean acidification and then tell us why increased atmospheric CO2 levels are okay.
Well.. Heck, if 1 billion in losses is all he's done, we are doing great.. The last guy was losing more than a trillion a year.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101