Tesla Tells Hundreds of Workers to Take a Hike, You're No Good

Tesla pfft.

I don't like that company.

At LAT, "Hundreds of Tesla workers were let go for subpar performance, the company says":

Outside #Tsla showroom in Walnut Creek, CA. Looks like alot of people are upset, even customers#model3delayed #whyelon pic.twitter.com/hDjwx2uS18

— Charlie (@TSLAEE) October 15, 2017

Firing hundreds of workers all at once is rare, at least in the auto industry. But Tesla Inc. does things differently.

Word leaked out Friday that the electric car, battery and solar roof company had bulk-fired several hundred employees.

The San Jose Mercury News, which broke that story, said Tesla made clear that workers were dismissed for subpar performance, not laid off. Layoffs tend be blamed on business conditions or overstuffed payrolls, not on job performance.

It's unclear how many of the company's 33,000 workers were cut. Tesla won't pinpoint the number. News reports put it between 400 and 1,200.

A factory employee told the Mercury News that about 60 fellow workers were told to head for the exit. The company said, however, that most of those dismissed work in administrative and sales jobs.

Some workers at the Tesla plant have been trying to organize a union.

"I had great performance reviews. I don't believe I was fired for performance," said Daniel Grant, who told The Times he's worked at Fremont factory since 2014 as a production assistant. He suspects he was fired because he raised safety issues and supported a union drive.

"The company didn't show me or others our most recent reviews when they fired us," Grant said. "I would like the company to release our full reviews, including peer reviews, to us."

An assembly line worker, Mike Williams, said his firing last week could not be the result of a bad performance review because, in his last review in 2016, "my supervisor had nothing but good things to say about me."

Other fired workers were treated the same, he said. "Our reviews were due in June. In June they told us they would be in August. In September they told us October."

Williams said he received a disciplinary write-up about a year ago for playing music that contained profanity but stopped when he was ordered to.
He was fired, he believes, because he spoke up about safety issues at employee meetings and because he wore a union shirt on what's become Union Shirt Friday for some workers at the Telsa plant. "I had a union sticker on my water bottle, too," he said.

Tesla declined to discuss the claims of either fired worker...

More.