tesla has denied which fired employees at its Autopilot facility in Buffalo, New York, in response to a new union campaign. Days after workers at the facility sent a letter to company boss Elon Musk indicating his intention to unionize, campaign organizers accused the automaker of illegally firing employees in retaliation. In a blog post, Tesla called his accusation a “false accusation” and said those who were fired lost their jobs through their own fault.
The company explained that it conducts performance reviews every six months and that workers are rated from 1 to 5 for each cycle. It “helps them calibrate their work,” Tesla wrote, and they will be fired if they don’t meet their performance expectations. These reviews are apparently taking place everywhere Tesla has facilities, with the most recent cycle running from July 2022 to December 2022. Tesla said it has identified the people who will be laid off on February 3, more than one week before organizers sent their letter to Musk, and that managers were told in December that underperforming employees would start leaving the company the week of February 12.
Furthermore, the company explicitly stated that 4 percent of the Autopilot tagging team employees were fired due to their poor performance reviews. (Tesla said it only learned in hindsight that one of the 27 affected employees is part of the union campaign.) They received prior feedback, Tesla said, but “did not demonstrate sufficient improvement.” If you’ll recall, the union organizers in Buffalo are in charge of labeling the data for Autopilot. they previously told him Bloomberg who are fighting for better wages and working conditions that reduce production pressures.
The workers said that Tesla monitors their keystrokes to determine how much time they spend on each task and how many hours they spend working in a day. They have reportedly been skipping bathroom breaks, as a result. But in Tesla’s response, he said that the time control is only there “to calculate how long it takes to label an image”, so “nothing is to be gained by delaying bathroom breaks”. The report that Tesla pressures its employees is “categorically false,” he added. Tesla, however, was silent about the employees’ complaint about not having a voice at the company: Workers previously said that talks to form a union began after management shut down an internal chat room where they can air their grievances.
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