• Tesla Buffalo unionization campaign initiated by Software team
• Tesla fires several employees shortly after the project becomes known
• Organizers call terminations retaliatory, Tesla disagrees
According to The New York Times, around 1,200 employees work at the Tesla site in Buffalo in the production of solar modules and components for chargers, and around 800 more are employed in the further development of driver assistance systems. In the latter department, production pressure is said to have recently increased. Tesla even monitors the keystrokes, so that some employees do not even dare to go to the toilet for fear of negative consequences. “If you need to go to the bathroom or you have an emergency, you can be punished,” said former Tesla employee Arian Berek, according to The New York Times.
To improve working conditions, wages and voice, some members of the software team working on image captions as part of the Autopilot advancement organized and campaigned to form a union. In the US, for a union to form, a majority of employees at a location must vote in favor of it. In order to be able to exchange ideas better with colleagues from other departments, especially production, members of the campaign committee informed their employer Tesla about their plans on February 14, according to “tagesschau.de”. Just one day later, several members of the team received notice of termination.
Employees see layoffs as retaliation for their plans
“It is very suspicious that all of this started the day after the letter was sent to the company,” said Arian Berek, who served on the campaign committee and lost her job as a data annotation specialist at Tesla in Buffalo in the wake of the said layoffs, according to ” The New York Times”. It is unclear exactly how many employees were laid off. According to the news website, the organizers initially spoke of at least 18, but by February 16 the number of employees affected had risen to 37. Tesla itself claims to have laid off 27 employees from the “Autopilot Labeling” department.
The organizers behind the union-building campaign filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board over the layoffs, according to the news site, describing them as retaliatory and intimidating measures against employees who tried to engage in union activities. The Rochester, NY branch of Workers United, which supported the initiative at Tesla in Buffalo, called the layoffs unlawful and asked the agency to seek a court order to reinstate the workers with payback.
That’s what Tesla says about the allegations
Tesla boss Elon Musk As is well known, he doesn’t think much of unions. For example, in a 2018 tweet, he suggested that Tesla employees would lose their stock options if they organized into a union. Corresponding efforts from this time have so far remained unsuccessful.
Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union. Could do so tmrw if they wanted. But why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing? Our safety record is 2X better than when plant was UAW & everybody already gets healthcare.
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 21, 2018
However, according to The New York Times, it is also illegal in the United States to fire workers for attempting to form a union. Accordingly, Tesla also rejected these allegations in a public statement on the company website. “There is a false claim that Tesla has fired employees in response to a new union campaign,” the electric car maker said. Instead, the layoffs were the consequence of a performance assessment that Tesla would carry out every six months at all of its locations.
As part of this assessment, the 27 affected employees from the software team had already received feedback in the period from July to December 2022 that their performance did not meet the requirements but did not improve sufficiently. In addition, management had already been informed in December 2022 that layoffs as a consequence of performance monitoring should take place in the week of February 12. Who exactly had to go was already clear on February 3rd. So the decisions were made long before Tesla even knew about the union campaign. “We learned afterwards that one of the 27 workers involved was officially identified as part of the union campaign,” the company said.
On the other hand, the group around Elon Musk confirmed the allegation that the employees in the “Autopilot labeling” department were monitored while they were working on the computer. “The reason there is tracking of time in image annotation is to improve the usability of our annotation software,” the company said. However, the fact that Tesla is urging its employees not to take toilet breaks is “categorically wrong”.
Tesla employees doubt official statement
As “The New York Times” reports, several employees at the Tesla plant in Buffalo have confirmed that the performance assessments mentioned would take place regularly. According to her statement, however, the resulting layoffs usually did not occur until March and the number of such layoffs had never been so high before. As the paper goes on to write, however, many of the employees who were fired actually had no connection to the planned union formation.
According to “The Guardian”, not all employees who pushed these plans forward – and want to continue to do so – have been fired. For example Sara Costantino, who, like the dismissed Arian Berek, belongs to the campaign committee. Nevertheless, she sees the measure as an attempt by Tesla to prevent the formation of a union. “We’re angry. It’s not going to slow us down. It’s not going to stop us. They want us to be scared, but I think they just unleashed a real rush,” said Costantino, who continues to work at Tesla, according to The Guardians”.
Arian Berek also contradicts the statements made by the electric car manufacturer, even if the union plans were not given to her as a reason for dismissal. “I got Covid and I wasn’t in the office, then I had to take a bereavement leave. I returned to work, was told I was exceeding expectations and then Wednesday came,” she said, referring to the news portal day she received the notice. “I firmly believe that this is retaliation for the committee’s announcement and it is shameful.”
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