Living around one of Tesla's Gigafactories, I have lots of friends who have worked/do work there.
In the case of our gigafactory, there's horror stories not just inside (machines injuring people), but everyone I talk to specifically talks about the dangers of the commute. It's not super far from town, but the road there is almost entirely used for commuting to and from Tesla, and it's one of those highways where the average speed of traffic is minimum 30mph above the speed limit. Crashes can be seen weekly (daily in the winter) and it affects people. It's a factory, so people are driving there at like 5am and racing there to not be late (they're super strict). Tesla has tried to solve it by providing buses to the factory, but then you'd need to wake up at like 3:30-4am and get home later too.
Where I live they had those but the people running the cameras would snap the photos and stack them so you'd get 60 or 90 days of violations and then they would send them in a big stack so you wouldn't know until the last minute you even did anything wrong, and get all 90 at once. There was also the issue of due process, which means a process server ($$$) had to actually serve the person (who would probably hide and not answer the door) as just sending it in the mail isn't legally considered served.
The other issue is for them to mean anything beyond a civil penalty against the car, you need to show who the driver was and give the public a chance to face their accuser. So people just started driving to work with ski masks, etc and if actually caught would demand a representative from the photo company actually show up in court.
In the off chance you actually were found guilty after all that (process server actually got to you, proved it was your face, accuser actually showed up in court, no technicality was found, and on and on) then the city had to spend practically half the fine money on royalty/maintenance fees to the companies running the camera (the city doesn't have the expertise to do all that on their own). You can imagine the anger and resentment that caused amongst the populace about sending their money away to some for-profit black hole (the executives of this company themselves are on record dodging the process servers too lol after being snapped by their own camera).
It is so abused and fucked up system from so many angles at least where I live it was voted out after having been thoroughly tested and tried.
Every single one of these problems is solvable by a society who actually cares to make roads safe.
But fundamentally you just have a bunch of assholes who think arriving literal MINUTES earlier to something is worth putting their own and dozens/hundreds of strangers’ lives at risk.
There are no speed cameras on the highways though.
But on principle, Sweden does it best with the cameras. Before the camera, there is warning sign that gives you plenty of time to slow down(unless you are seriously speeding) which makes much more sense than hidden cameras IMHO. It makes people slow down at dangerous spots on the road, which is the whole point with the cameras right?
that's literally every factory ever, I really don't see how commuting is Tesla's problem, and I've never heard of a factory offering a bus service to employees, an amazing employee benefit that's usually reserved to highly paid tech workers who live around their company's HQ city
Auto accidents are extremely serious. Wasn't that originally one of the arguments for why you should invest in Tesla? Because they will supposedly, one day, have cars that drive themselves safely?
But now that you completely punctured that thought bubble in my head with your incisive comment, I guess they are no big deal. They can all pack it up and liquidate.
What's different about this Tesla factory that people speeding on the highway leading to it are attributable to the factory? I don't see anything different from any other place where people are speeding to get there on time. Put police there. This is not Tesla's fault in any way.
It pays to pay attention to the specific wording of his post. He really doesn't want his workers to unionize, and the reason he dared UAW to hold the vote is because he knows that because of historical reasons UAW is really unpopular in Fremont.
In short, Fremont used to be a GM plant and have their own union. When this union was absorbed into UAW, it was fairly contentious and many in Fremont believed that UAW didn't care about auto workers in California. Then very shortly after, UAW negotiated with GM about downsizing, and the end result was that the Fremont plant was shut down. This was seen in Fremont as a total betrayal. Soon after, Tesla bought the plant.
So UAW really isn't liked, and any vote about organizing under them would be a landslide against. A different union might be a lot more successful.
It’s pretty obvious that Elon does not respect votes as he hasn’t stepped down, and is preoccupied with his tweets’ popularity or better the lack thereof.
"…Musk's cousin, James, sent an internal message on Slack to Twitter's engineers at 2:26AM on Monday morning concerning a "high urgency" situation. The emergency was that Biden's post performed better than Musk's. Around 80 Twitter engineers were brought in to work on the issue. By Monday afternoon, a fix was implemented to the algorithm that allowed Musk's tweets – and only Musk's tweets – to "bypass Twitter’s filters," which in turn "artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000," promoting Musk's content in everyone's feed."
Over past year I've watched my partner switch from wanting a Tesla to wanting a Polestar 2. The decision is based entirely on Tesla's brand image and it's things like this and Elon posting on twitter that just keep doing it damage. It's difficult to boycott Amazon but it is not difficult to boycott Tesla, do they not understand their customer base cares about this sort of thing? Or is it not doing actual damage to the brand?
Do you also boycott other brands for worse crimes than shitposting on twitter? Is it more important to boycott Tesla because of Elon than it is to boycott Geely, which owns the Polestar brand, which has been linked to forced Uyghur labor in Xinjiang?
I think s***posting on Twitter is a huge undersatement, what Elon has done on Twitter is un-ban right-wing and hate speech people. He has made the world significatly more full of hate. That is not s***posting.
The citation on your post about Geely is a "data is based on supplier lists" so I think we can take it from a different perspective:
So what is worse imo? What are we weighing up here? Tesla vs Polestar. Elon making the world more full of hate vs Geely having suppliers on this list. If I had to pick one of those two, it would still easily be Polestar.
No, I do not think I will boycott Geely based on this, I will contact them and see if they can clear their act up. I hope Nintendo and Nike do too on that list. I cannot forgive or get over the damage Elon has done.
> He has made the world significatly more full of hate
This is demonstrably false. Hate speech impressions and the number of tweets containing slurs are lower than they were pre-acquisition. He has actively reduced it. The TwitterSafety account provides this data.
Also if you're upset at Twitter for not censoring perspectives counter to the typical American left, are you also going to boycott Facebook, Youtube, WhatsApp, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc? Virtually all of these platforms host far-right influencers. Are you going to boycott ISPs for providing service to these people? Boycott Apple for selling them iPhones? These companies all have the same choice and ability to refuse services to these people. Why is only Elon the bad guy here?
Also, good to know where you stand. Letting Ben Shapiro post stupid shit on twitter is worse than literal slavery imposed on a group of people for their religious beliefs. Stay classy, HN.
I'm sorry I've no idea who Ben Shapiro is, could you go into a little detail here please? I'm from the UK so I'm not sure what's going on over there, Elon's reach does come here though because Twitter is global.
Edit - I showed my partner your messages and he said it's a moot point because the Tesla doesn't have Car Play, so even if Elon started acting nice he still wouldn't get the Tesla until Car Play is supported. The Polestar 2 does have Car Play.
For me, Tesla's brand impression is more favorable than Amazon. I don't give either one of them any money though. I would consider buying from Tesla though. This particular news story doesn't strike me as being particularly significant. At least in a way I understand. I have a pretty loose understanding of what union stuff is all about.
> Tesla Workers United told News 4 on Thursday that over 30 workers were fired from Gigafactory 2 in Buffalo on Wednesday, after workers attempted to organize earlier this week.
> “I returned to work (from COVID and a bereavement leave), was told I was exceeding expectations and then Wednesday came along,” said organizing committee member Arian Berek in a release. “I strongly feel this is in retaliation to the committee announcement and it’s shameful.”
> Thursday, News 4 reached out again and received a bounce-back email, which said Tesla’s press email inbox is full and cannot currently accept messages.
If it is on-prem, not really. You'd have to intentionally or unintentionally set a restrictive quota on it and I have no idea why you'd do that for a press inbox. There is a user in my org who has a 120GB mailbox because they never delete anything ever. It is annoying to us, but it works just fine.
Source: Exchange on-prem admin. Cloud hosted email is probably less accommodating.
You sure could set a mailbox size limit in Exchange environments, though even at small companies Ive set limits of 50gb/mailbox - thousands and thousands of messages.
This guy and his companies keep showing us what a terrible person he is yet people keep buying their cars and the government keeps subsidizing musks companies...
California law bans recording without consent and explicitly says such recordings can’t be used as evidence in court. This applies in all settings except a few very narrow carveouts.
Organizers, say, on a zoom call with anyone in one of the 12 states requiring all parties to consent are committing a crime if they record.
This is one of those cases where some people like protections when they protect people they like and don’t like protections when they apply to people they don’t like.
Ok let’s turn that around, every other crime should get those protections from wiretapping outside of labor laws and sexual harassment? Why are those topics special?
I'd argue it is a stretch to assume it's anything but union busting given the timing, as if the goal is not to disrupt the union formation they'd have every reason to delay to prevent the appearance of it.
The timing of press articles was _entirely_ up to the people claiming to want to unionize. They most likely knew layoffs were coming, announced they wanted to unionize, then when layoff happened (which would likely have happened without the unionization announcement) accused Tesla of union busting.
According to this article, Tesla terminated employees one day after the unionisation campaign was announced. As such, even if the layouts had been planned beforehand, it was entirely Tesla's choice to still go ahead, knowing the impression it'd create. If Tesla didn't intend this to be a union-busting move, the smart move would be to delay. For that reason, coupled with the fact they've been found to illegally fire staff over unionisation efforts before [1] it's very hard to give them any benefit of the doubt. Either it's intentional, or Tesla are being idiots. Or both.
The alternative for Tesla would be to not put themselves in a situation where firings like this look inherently suspect because they have a history of attempted union busting, including by illegally firing people.
please provide the reporting and analytics and data that tesla uses to make these decisions and provide your analysis on why this isn't a legitimate reduced need for certain job functions
I don't have to prove anything, it's called being reasonable. It's a reasonable assumption to make. It's going to be what they have to rebut in court. Past that you are just being unreasonable, obtuse, and argumentative.
Solid approach to data; completely wasted on a product they’ll never achieve…
I won’t weigh into the politics of the situation, but anyone who has their head on straight can see by now that “full self driving” isn’t becoming a reality any time soon. Even if the technology works out somehow, the politics of thing will take decades.
More interesting to me is the lessons the engineers learn there and take with them to other efforts, where success is more possible.
It turns out that they weren't as important of employees after all. Tesla was underpaying them anyway so this is ultimately a good thing for people who were working below market rate because they liked the company.
Not being able to unionize is an aberration of capitalism. In my country unions do exist and albeit being soemwhat outdated now on some fronts, they are the main reason behind huge advancements in worker wellbeing.
As I'm not an expert on American Employment and Labour Union laws, does anyone with more experience know: is this not very likely to cause significant problems for Tesla with the NLRB?
It depends. If they were violating an existing corporate policy and got fired, there won’t be any problems for the company. Likewise if they were recording meetings with participants in California or one of the other states which require all parties to consent to recordings as those are explicitly crimes and Tesla could have the employees charged.
If the policy didn’t already exist there might be problems. You have to be squeaky clean in order to defend your job while trying to unionize in a company unfriendly to the idea.
That's what the whole ESG kerfuffle has been about. There are some funds that are "socially minded" that try to exclude cigarette manufacturers and other bad things. They're smaller and have a higher expense ratio than VTI.
It's pretty hard to keep seeing major companies with insane pockets work together against their employees easily rid themselves of employees who want to meet them on a more level playing field by working together.
With Sweden Unionen no one could have salary rise without Unionen approval.
This makes Unionen a single point of failure: when bargaining with company, it's almost always the lowest possible rise (usually lower than inflation) for the yearly salary rise (which should by design compensate the inflation).
The whole point of a union is that it is a monopoly. This means they are incredibly hard to disrupt, and it is near impossible to start new ones. Many of the early ones had to use threat of violence.
They're free to work elsewhere and are adults and responsible for their own income. If they're upset with the conditions at Tesla enough to want a union they could just work elsewhere instead.
Doesn't say anywhere they can't take them just that some are claiming they're skipping them to keep their performance up don't think we should just taking their word on face value. It's just a statement to try and make their work expectations seem unreasonable when we all know the real goal is to lower expectations and raise pay at the threat of halting production.
I'm by no means a Musk fan but its a free country, Tesla shouldn't have to be held hostage to these people, no ones forcing them to work there.
You probably didn't mean it that way, but thinking this through will get you to the conclusion that "Democracy" (which isn't really a thing) is an engine for decline, similar to unions.
Non-competes are evil and should not exist. They used to be unconstitutional until additional legislation was introduced (the details elude me right now).
For a lot of regions, employees are up against the only large employer in their area - be it Tesla, Walmart or Amazon. The latter actually is famous for setting up shop in devastated areas because labor there is cheap and forced by circumstances to accept whatever conditions they are given.
The problem is the leverage these big employers have - they are free to deal with their workers as they want, including underpaying, breaking laws like anti-union busting regulations...
If you look at the broader spectrum and compare US workers rights with most of the EU, Europes fight was worth it and these have been gained by literally dying for the cause before unions appeared.
It has gone overboard in places like Italy, but the workers right certainly did not and would have never come from the employers.
EU worker compensation continues to diverge from the US, and not in a good way. Because unions don't create wealth, they simply re-distribute it at great cost for society.
>to obtain from a person by force, intimidation, or undue or illegal power
A union is none of those things. (Yes, there are instances where they have done all of those things before, but we seem to have pretty much solved that problem)
The thing that's alleged here is that Tesla is blatantly breaking the law to fire employees that are engaging in lawful activities. How many employees need to be affected before this becomes "unreasonable"? 26? 50? One hundred? If Teslas structures and procedures are not in line with the law, then they need to change - regardless of the number of affected individuals.
In general people need to work to live dignified lives. To me the natural consequence of this is that you cannot employ people and treat them any way you like. They are not like machines, their dignity has to be preserved.
There are several ways to achieve this (plain old regulation being one of those tools), but allowing people to freely associate without that association being the reason to fire them seems like another pretty obvious and great tool.
I don’t really understand why the vision of companies as empires with absolute monarchs seems so appealing to people. That seems like a disgusting vision to me that we should strive to avoid. Since people aren’t machines.
You bring up some interesting points, but I respectfully disagree.
Companies are subject to the scrutiny of customers, shareholders, the stock market and a highly competitive job market. This creates a level of democratic accountability that, in my opinion, exceeds even that of Scandinavian countries.
As a Tesla employee, I have many options regardless of my talent or leverage, unlike when I don't like my country's policies where my choices are limited.
> Companies are subject to the scrutiny of customers, shareholders, the stock market and a highly competitive job market. This creates a level of democratic accountability that, in my opinion, exceeds even that of Scandinavian countries.
Democratic accountability to the investors and owners of capital, sure, but not to the employees (the subject at hand) or society (what a "Scandinavian country" would be focused on).
If Tesla were a startup with a dozen employees, I'd buy your argument. But Tesla is a manufacturing company that hires people that need to compete for a job to make enough money to feed themselves. None of the people categorizing images do so because they believe in a vision. The power dynamics are entirely different here and the one thing that helps workers achieve a semblance of power is unions. That's the reason unions are protected.
NASA sort of is against your point right? the Apollo program had lots of deaths and accidents and unsafe working conditions but it went to the moon. Maybe NASA now has good working conditions and employees have dignity but they haven't done anything nearly as impressive to the wider public
Unions want to change the world. They just want to change it in a way that leaves the Musks of the world with less money. Don't be confused, this isn't about "change the world" vs. stagnation, it's about the spoils.
I don’t see the kind of utopian equilibrium you are describing manifest itself anywhere.
The central question is how do you prevent a race to the bottom? And I just don’t see that manifesting itself if abolish labor rights (which to me seems to be what you are advocating for).
People already don’t have a lot of choice when it comes to their employer. How will you make sure that there are enough jobs for people "want(ing) to go slow"? (Toilet breaks, overtime that is actually paid, parental leave, reasonable limits on work time, ergonomic and safe work places, unlimited and paid sick leave, a reasonable amount of vacation time, i.e. more than a month, etc. This is all standard where I’m from and unions help enforce this.)
What part of moving fast requires treating employees like shit? (Where my definition of treating like shit is not having any of the things listed above in brackets?)
If a visionary organization is brought to its knees by giving bathroom breaks to workers, then it probably deserves to be replaced by another organization that is more competent at executing on that same vision.
Yes. There is never a situation in which unionization is “unreasonable”. To say otherwise is to allow businesses to have near unchecked leverage over their workers.
Your tone is respectful but your questions don't really make any sense to me. The company and the government hold unions responsible, they are not all-powerful and often much less powerful than the company. No, it is not justifiable to deprive you of your rights, and fortunately unions can't do that.
They are powerful but not unaccountable. Every time a union strikes they use up some of their power, both with the general public and their members (who want to work!).
In the case of many public unions they are legislatively prevented from striking.
The idea that unions are the ones with significant leverage over their employers in this day and age is baffling. Just look at the railroad workers who got manhandled by a Democratic government!
If there are not enough jobs in the area and not enough capital to kickstart businesses, the people in that area are in a situation where something is better than nothing. So a corporation can come in, offer below subsistence wages and the people will feel as if they have no other option. It's not what the labor is technically worth because the value produced by the labor far exceeds the wage given to the laborer.
Individual laborers have no power to fix this. The employer can fire them and exploit the next desperate person. They can even cycle through back to the original person as they get more desperate.
Collectively, the laborers can do something. They can redress the balance between laborer and owner. But only as a collective. The minute the individuals are allowed to operate independently, the old system reasserts itself.
Stop carrying water for people who won't even allow you a drink for your efforts.
They aren't "a part of" schools and corporations, they are the schools and corporations. It is obvious why 90% of an organization can make a decision to shut it down. When unions are smaller and don't constitute such a large portion of an organization, as will be the case with Tesla, they are not able to shut it down.
With all due respect, I'm at a loss of words, so please excuse the term: You appear to be thoroughly brainwashed. A worker's union protects you, as an employee, from overreaching corporations. It is held accountable by laws. They don't deprive you of your rights, but holds corporations accountable for doing so.
A union does not protect you by default. In fact, their actions might endanger you if it runs counter to the continuation of the company's mission. And companies are already held accountable by law, so you do not need a union to do that, either.
What a union actually is? A competing power structure within a company, and op questions whether such a thing is reasonable in this case. You did not answer but instead tried to try to brainwash op by shaming them into accepting your essentialization of unions as something good in all cases.
Holding companies accountable via the law does not work, because there is a fundamental imbalance: People compete for good jobs, so they are willing to accept a certain amount of injustice, which gets larger the fewer jobs there are. Employers know this, and use it against you: You can't do anything against it on your own, because they will simply hire someone else.
Unions in turn fight this by representing a lot of employees, so the employer cannot simply ignore them. The have fought bitterly for humane conditions, a 40 hour work week, and abolished child labor. You might call this overly dramatic, but that's where you get if you let corporations run free (remember those news stories about child labor in Texas lately?).
A "company's mission" doesn't mean shit if it doesn't even treat its employees like human beings. If you want to be a good slave, have it your way - but stop characterising unions as somehow evil.
By creating an environment of respect in employment terms. In a word, inertia. There is a reason employment contracts with greater than 40 hours a week are almost unheard of. Union blood was spilled to bring it down to that.
It's unreasonable, (and depending on the jurisdiction, illegal), for corporations to make a difference between unionised and un-unionised workers. So by promoting improvements for their members, they promote improvements for all employees.
Why is it unreasonable? There are plenty of auto manufacturers in right to work states who do just that. Why shouldn't anyone be allowed to work for Tesla in Buffalo regardless if they want to be a part of a union or not?
Generally if it's just a fraction of employees, you're not going to get significant change. Once a union appears, it's no longer just a fraction of employees you're talking about.
More generally: how should employees effect change at their organisation? Especially when treated unreasonably?
Regrettably, this is not accurate. The law restricts employers from dismissing employees who seek to unionize and effect change in the company's direction.
I hesitate to elaborate further, as the specifics are likely to attract scrutiny or censure.
Yes. Luckily, the law prevents overreaching employers from firing employees that insist on their rights. The alternative is a return to 18th century factory conditions, and I'm sure even you don't want that.
So if your company has a bus factor of one it's perfectly fine if the company takes illegal actions to ensure that employee can't quit or take vacations if it would bring the company to its knees?
Yes, you're absolutely right, it's ridiculous that 25 employees had to try and form a union in order to get toilet breaks. but here we are...
I, personally, don't see how a company full of galaxy-brained individuals and visionaries could stay operating if they had to make such massive changes to working conditions such as... allowing toilet breaks. I personally think you and I should form a union so that we can bargain for better access rights to Elon Musk's boots, they aren't going to lick themselves.
The siren song of cancel culture is impossible to resist. Imagine had you written that the employees were entitled or that they found out how capitalism and concept of ownership worked, the audacity! I wonder how hard the downvoters invest into mashing the downvote button.
or, find another employer of which, outside the bloated tech sector, there are plenty looking for employees, especially small businesses which have been begging for more help. If you're used to working for megacorp, try a small business where you get to know the owners
>A union only has power if the company is hurt by a strike. And in this case, there is nothing beyond minor inconvenience.
So they're working in a horrible situation from a job security standpoint, and that should make them less want to organize? What would you suggest they do?
I don't think they intentionally tried to kill the industry, as it was foreign production didn't have this problem of unions. Also the Japanese during the 70s had a lean six sigma type thing going on.
Little more complicated than Unions I think, that lead to the point we were at.
In the case of our gigafactory, there's horror stories not just inside (machines injuring people), but everyone I talk to specifically talks about the dangers of the commute. It's not super far from town, but the road there is almost entirely used for commuting to and from Tesla, and it's one of those highways where the average speed of traffic is minimum 30mph above the speed limit. Crashes can be seen weekly (daily in the winter) and it affects people. It's a factory, so people are driving there at like 5am and racing there to not be late (they're super strict). Tesla has tried to solve it by providing buses to the factory, but then you'd need to wake up at like 3:30-4am and get home later too.