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.

Comments

Many was pro-union? What a surprise!

[Eloking]

Many of the fired worker because of bad performance were also pro-union? I'm so surprised!

Re:Many was pro-union? What a surprise!

[Dutch Gun]

Also, just for the record, being in a union doesn't prevent a company from laying off workers by the thousands. My uncle worked for Boeing as a union machinist a few decades ago, and I recall stories about how Boeing would lay off large numbers of workers, which many suspected was mostly about boosting short term stock prices or price-earning ratios (which, completely co-incidentally, could make executives a lot in bonuses). Only they actually needed those workers to meet production demands, so a few months later, most of them would be quietly hired back.

I'm not sure if that's what's happening at Tesla, but it's hard to say when you're just looking in from the outside. The UAW isn't exactly a disinterested party without an agenda either. Unions are as much a business as anything else.

It will be interesting to see if Tesla can demonstrate that these were indeed poorly-performing employees via documentation, reviews, complaints, etc.

Re:Many was pro-union? What a surprise!

[Uberbah]

If corporate overlords treated their workers fairly, unions never would have existed in the first place. Workers who depend on their next paycheck for their standard of living aren't going to start out from Day 1 looking to put those checks in jeopardy by going against the company. Unless they have a reason to.

This isn't rocket science.

Re: Many was pro-union? What a surprise!

[Anonymous Coward]

So how is anyone going to be able to give an honest insider view of what is really happening if they are automatically shills if they don't bash the employer?

Stupid Union Shill.

Re:Many was pro-union? What a surprise!

[torkus]

Actually no.

An at-will state allows for termination for no reason at all. You just can't terminate "BECAUSE UNION" specifically but you can surely terminate because, because. It's upon the individual to prove discrimination at that point.

Furthermore, it's pretty damn easy to give someone a poor performance review and terminate them on the spot unless you have specific policies in place for remediation. Since generally at least some aspects of reviews are subjective, there's little stopping an employer from marking those in the red and letting you go.

'Isn't agreeable with direction from management' is a nice one. Since you're going to disagree with management on your review, it's a handy circular argument that's nearly impossible to win.

Re:Many was pro-union? What a surprise!

[HuguesT]

That's the easy, short term way. In reality these people asking for 90% of your salary could be 100% untrained.

So in Bayesian terms . . .

[Wrath0fb0b]

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 . . .

Re:Slashdot factions

[steveha]

A person has to wonder if a Slashdot faction commenting on this story has an "agenda."

My only agenda is to hope that Tesla succeeds, because I like the advances they have made in the state of the art. (For example, Tesla "SuperCharger" is a better charging technology than anything else available.) I don't want to see them hurting their employees, but I don't really think they need to hurt their employees to succeed.

Everyone agrees that Tesla's production process had problems and needed to improve. Tesla claims they have improved.

Here's an article about that:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidmarquet/2017/06/04/elon-musk-safety-autopilot/#5d8a4b9a7a88

According to Tesla's official blog post, they went from having a worse-than-average safety record in their factory, to having a better-than-average record. I haven't heard anything about it getting worse again, and I'm pretty sure that would be widely reported news if it happened.

Also, one of their improvements was adding a third shift, so that work would happen 24 hours a day. This greatly reduced overtime, and was welcomed by the line workers. From the blog post: "Last year, we added a third shift to reduce the overtime burden on each team member and to improve safety. We did this because our employees asked for it, and because it was the right thing to do."

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.

Honda has been making cars since 1963 (and motorcycles before then). They have had just a bit more time to fine-tune their operations.

Tesla has spent big money on overhauling their production process. They are planning to crank out a very large number of Model 3 cars per year, and they can't do that with a labor-intensive process. Tesla says that the Model 3 has been designed to be easy to manufacture, using lessons learned while manufacturing their other cars.

Recently Tesla shared a video of the robots making Model 3 cars: http://bgr.com/2017/10/09/tesla-model-3-elon-musk-video-production-line/

There are over a half-million Model 3 cars on pre-order. If Tesla can sort out their production line and get those cars delivered in a timely fashion, they will be heroes. If not, they will be in huge trouble and possibly will go bankrupt.

The Tesla Model S is an incredible automobile, they tell me

It really is.

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?

From what I have read, a Model S costs Tesla about $30K to make, so no, they are not giving away effectively hand-built cars, they are making a solid profit on each car sold.

The stories of 70-hour work weeks of relentless pressure are just sour grapes from slackers who deserved to be cut loose?

Tesla says that since they added the third shift (sometime in 2016) that the average number of hours worked per week is 42. Do you have newer data that contradicts this?

here 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?

I had no idea what you were talking about here. Google found this for me:

Re: Easy to dismiss

[Uberbah]

In even right-to-work-for-less states, you can indeed be fired for any reason - unless that reasoning is illegal. Being black, a woman getting pregnant, someone advocating for unions on personal or break time...those reasons are illegal.