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Tesla Hit With Labor Complaint On Behalf of Fired Factory Workers (theverge.com)
On behalf of the hundreds of Tesla workers that were fired last week from the company's assembly plant, the United Auto Workers filed a complaint today to the National Relations Board. The UAW posted a copy of the complaint on its website, which alleges that pro-union workers were unfairly targeted. The Verge reports: The UAW says the complaint was made on Wednesday to the Oakland offices of the National Relations Board. The union claims the recent culling of several hundred Tesla employees included many who were involved in a pro-union movement at the Fremont assembly plant, and included those who wore pro-union shirts and stickers. The Fremont factory site has roots in the UAW. It was once a former joint manufacturing facility owned by GM and Toyota, until it closed in 2010. Despite ongoing efforts, under Tesla's ownership, the factory is not unionized. A pro-union rally was held Tuesday in front of the plant, which was documented in a Facebook post by the pro-union group A Fair Future at Tesla.
Many of the fired worker because of bad performance were also pro-union? I'm so surprised!
Elok
I was sure we are already 3D printing entire cars??
Unless Tesla is full of shit
I'm still looking for a $50,000 a year job in IT in Silicon Valley though. Any ideas?
It's not the National Relations Board... it's the National Labor Relations Board. Why do you cut and paste crap without checking it? Isn't that an editor's job?
He's still on Trump's business advisory board. Sustainable energy clearly is just a marketable opportunity hes not serious about the environment. The firing of people at Telsa is a knee Jerk reaction to people pointing out the simple fact he is just burning through money, so he just went with the crudest cost cutting exercise in the book, get rid of some high paid workers.
Just move to a state with right to work laws. That's what happens.
Raise your asking price to $70-90k, else you won't be taken seriously.
If Tesla fired a bunch of workers for being pro-union, the union would file a complaint.
If Tesla fired a bunch of workers that were low performers, the union would file a complaint.
If Tesla fired a bunch of workers that were low performers but the reviews were {1%, 10%, 50%, 90%, 99%} biased against unionizers, the union would file a complaint.
There is literally no information to go on here besides our own biases. Of course, actually digging through hundreds of personnel files with dozens of performance reviews, correlating it with what the company thought, seeing if there are emails of improper motives, that would take a while and be fought. Best to stick to your gut instinct about evil companies or slacker workers or . . .
So what? You can basically fire or lay someone off for any reason whatsoever, short of sex, religion, or age.
It is an odd thing for Ayn Rand disciples with the empathy for workers of the fictional Gordon Gecko to be so stoked to tell us "Nothing to see here, move along" about Tesla. Usually those in the free-market-uber-alles faction are just not that impressed by electric cars. A person has to wonder if a Slashdot faction commenting on this story has an "agenda."
It is also an odd thing that Honda and other multi-national automakers have been able to set up non-union shops here in the U.S. without engaging in across-the-board purges in a way to get the UAW to smell blood.
Talking about blood, Jean-Louis Gassee, who has a chronic medical condition requiring frequent testing of his own blood, had some interesting insights as to why tech wunderkind Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos blood-testing company seemed odd. More recently he blogged about visiting the Fremont plant as a celebrity Model S purchaser and how he rubbed his Tesla-enthusiastic fellow celebrities the wrong way with his remarks (Gassee was buying a Model S for his wife, he explains). Parts were stacked high in contradiction of Lean Manufacturing dogma, and in contrast with the Maryville, Ohio Honda plant he had observed, the Tesla shop floor activity was frenetic. The Honda plant, by contrast, had its assembly line running so smoothly that the workers did not appear to be breaking a sweat.
The Tesla Model S is an incredible automobile, they tell me, and maybe the problem with it is that it is incredible that Tesla is able to sell an automobile of that sophistication for the price they charge without it all being smoke-and-mirrors of burning out its workers and fleecing its investors to contribute the labor and money to in effect give away what are effectively hand-built quarter million-dollar cars?
The stories of 70-hour work weeks of relentless pressure are just sour grapes from slackers who deserved to be cut loose? And what about SpaceX, the darling of the Ayn Rand space cadets, where Musk is able to work miracles launching reusable rockets for low money while the Boeing and Rocketdyne or whoever are spinning their fins attempting to build a new rocket, using armies of slacker aerospace workers who just put in their time and then go home to watch their daughters' soccer games, whereas SpaceX has a cadre of enthusiastic non-slacking workers putting in the 70-hour work weeks of the Apollo era where everyone ended up divorced?
Back at Tesla, they are trying to speed up their line ten-fold to go from the high-end luxury market of the S to the upper-mass market sedan market of the Model 3. And there are just some "bottlenecks" to be worked out? While their "body" line tooling is still being put together in some undisclosed location in Southeast Michigan?
So everything is fine with everything Elon, and he is going to work out these snags like he has worked out every engineering problem he has faced before because he is a Genius, the bitching about these recent dismissals is just a distraction. OK.
Tesla and SolarCity hit with lawsuit concerning their non-existent SolarRoof product.
...who has nothing but distain for his fellow workers. Huh, never seen that in an anti-union story before.
You know we are such great workers here in the US, I wonder why on Earth any company would even consider replacing us with robots or Chinese workers. Not when we can arbitrarily sue for being asked to do work for pay we agreed to.
To someplace where people want to work and DO work.
I heard the employees who got fired were "shocked". Sorry couldn't resist(er)
As I said, Mr. Gassee visits the assembly line as a celebrity Model S purchaser, snarks about what he sees to his fellow celebrity Model S purchasers, and is treated as a social pariah.
I suspect that Tesla may be overworking its employees to square the circle between what they are promising and what is possible. Am I eager to see them fail? Would I have been eager to see the Roman Empire fail, after all, those guys who couldn't keep up with the accelerated rowing tempo deserved to be whipped -- see https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
And skepticism about the enterprise makes me vested in seeing Tesla fail (a wrecker or saboteur or is it a moocher or looter in keeping with the Rand's anti-Socialism?).
Battle speed, hortator!
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