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Comment by justina1 | Hacker News Reader

Tesla's preemptive response: https://www.tesla.com/blog/creating-the-safest-car-factory-i...

This is spinning so hard that I'm having a hard time reading it.

It sounds like they're increasing efficiency and improving safety but not actually sharing efficiency gains with employees who are being force to work "eager college grad at a startup" hours.

If that's true, how has "the average amount of hours worked by production team members dropped to about 42 hours per week"?

I wonder what the median is though

They introduced a third shift recently, but have been working around the clock since the very beginning. 5 years is way too much time for a management team to notice that working 12x6 with your body is way different than working the same amount of time behind a desk. That's what happens when Silicon Valley ethos meets the real world.

I guess nobody told the nerds that back-breaking work was not really a metaphore in the good old days.

Are we reading the same blog post, Tesla is saying that the allegations about their work conditions are not accurate but rather an effort by the UAW to spread negative publicity about their work environment in a push for unionization.

Now this may be true or false, but it isnt spin.

>an effort by the UAW to spread negative publicity about their work environment in a push for unionization

This is the spin. What evidence is there? and regardless, why should Tesla be fighting against workers unionization rights to begin with?

"The alternative is to stop improving and to instead do what the rest of the industry, including the UAW, has always done. But being industry average would make our safety 32% worse. We care too much about our team to go backwards."

That safety question is where my interest lies, because it seems completely at odds with the narrative the UAW is pushing. If the safety rate is truely higher in the Tesla factory and the compensation workers receive is equal to what auto workers in other factories receive, what does the UAW have to offer to Tesla factory workers by unionizing?

I would also point out that the UAW has been on a bit of a anti-Tesla public relations blitz lately, which is something that creates public pressure on Tesla, but doesn't seems like it would affect the workers at all. If the conditions in the factory are really that sub-standard the workers themselves would know, they wouldn't need newspapers to tell them that.

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