Tesla wanted to clarify some rumors about the dismissals of some employees wish to unionize. The American brand insists that it’s just a coincidence, the performances of these people were not good enough.
Employees working on the Tesla Autopilot at the Buffalo plant shared their desire to unionize. Except that in Uncle Sam’s country, a union, what we call a “union” there, is not a fundamental right. A few years earlier in 2017, Elon Musk even threatened to withdraw some employees’ shares in the company if they formed a union.
In the same Autopilot department, several redundancies took place in Gigafactory New York. Very quickly, there was a connection with wanting to be part of a union. Tesla was forced to express himself in a statement because of his accusations around Elon Musk.
“Tesla conducts performance review cycles every six months,” the firm said in the release. “Every cycle, employees receive a performance score of 1 to 5. This helps them calibrate their work according to their job expectations. In the worst case scenario, if an employee does not meet performance expectations, they are terminated.”
“The most recent performance review cycle was from July 2022 to December 2022. On December 13, 2022, company managers received a communication regarding the review schedule. This included information indicating that departures of low-performing employees would begin the week of February 12, 2023.”
Apparently only one dismissal occurred among employees suspected of wanting to unionize.
As a result of this performance review, several New York employees were fired. But again, the brand insists that there is no connection to Elon Musk’s threats.
He explains again : “ About 4% of the Autopilot team’s employees in Buffalo were laid off as a result of this performance review cycle. Employees who were terminated as part of this process received prior feedback on their poor performance from their managers during the review period. Despite these comments, they have not shown sufficient improvement. “
And adds : “ The affected employees were identified on February 3, 2023, well before the union campaign was announced. We became aware of the organizational activities about 10 days later. We learned a posteriori that one of the 27 employees had officially identified himself as part of the union campaign. This exercise predated any union campaign.”
Tesla is not out of the woods, public opinion is not convinced to tell them and still accuses Elon Musk.
Leave a Reply