Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory
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[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-04/two-tesla... [2] https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2017/08/02/tesla-ts...
https://www.economist.com/news/business/21709061-entrepreneu...
Perhaps the wheels are starting to come off. Even if they do, it's been amazing what has been achieved.
In reality, Tesla's pricing strategy is to charge $50K-$60K for the Model 3.[1] This is BMW / Mercedes-Benz territory.
[1] https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/08/06/surprise-the-real-...
Josh Ensign left to become COO at a different company and his stint at Tesla was the longest in his list of experience: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-ensign-3604431/
Greg Reichow worked at Tesla for 5.5 years and switched jobs to become an investor: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregreichow/
Kurt Kelty was at Panasonic for 14 years and Tesla for 11.5. As far as we know from LinkedIn he hasn't got a new job, which you could see as fine (left for personal reasons or simply burnt out) or bad (left because he saw doom ahead, even though he didn't have another job lined up). https://www.linkedin.com/in/kurt-kelty-5604bb/
What is so bad about these departures? Simply the timing?
But yeah, this is terrible. If you don't expect you're going to be fired for bad performance, that's a company's failure, not yours.
Fired or layed off? I've never experienced either, but I always thought severance pay was exclusive to the latter.
Poor performance isn’t typically a “bad thing” in this sense. For instance, if someone went and pissed in the coffee pot, they would be fired. If a big group of people were simply told to not come in anymore it’s laid off. Tesla specifically said this wasn’t laying people off so I’m not sure how that works.
I don’t know if there’s any legal or contractual grounds for one or the other but I’d guess it would matter what state you’re in.
I know for a lot of states collecting unemployment benefits does require some sort of reason for termination that is related to the above distinction.
Being made redundant tends to be the situation that attracts a severance package of any significance. Depending entirely on the country and state of course.
For this reason, it's sometimes more practical for a company to terminate someone without cause, and just pay out the benefits as a cost of doing business. They can wait for a slow season, when they would normally shed some workers, and terminate the lowest performers.
Companies avoid the term "layoff" because it has connotations, such as eligibility to be re-hired when conditions improve. So they use "reduction in force" instead. The people who are fired are "impacted," and so forth.
The terminology used doesn't mean anything... what matters is whether someone was terminated "with cause" or not.
"PETER Boy. I tell ya, one of these days... One of these days it's gonna be like
He mimics a machine gun. Brian, a waiter, does it too, in Peter's face."
He went to hearing to get his unemployment, and won because the layer from bigco, sent to the hearing from out of state literally wouldn't answer any questions.
http://www.masslegalhelp.org/employment-unemployment/ui-if-f...
They are people, they have lives and it wasn't anything like gross misconduct.
I think Mr Musk has a lot to answer for.
I think even if we had regulations and requirements like that in the US, it would quickly devolve into a charade. Basically, a six month pip would be the same as a six month notice with the option to fire you any time anyway.
Shitty, but par for the course for many bigco places (outside tech), from what I have heard over the years.
That didn't totally make sense, as they still had to find a manager for his team. But since the whole layoff was arbitrary, it didn't have to make sense. His whole team stayed.
I always thought it was a baller move. And looking at LinkedIn, he's had a solid career since, so it clearly didn't hurt him any.
Any and all of us can, and some will be, 'fired' for less with less.
There’s a mandatory three-month notice period in Sweden, so that the person who is fired (or sho leaves) has the time to find a new job
There are thousands of places to work all over the world.
By all means work in Munich if you want to. But to choose to live and work in a city and then complain about rent is absurd.
- if the employee leaves, it benefits the business:
-- the employee has the time to hand over their work
-- the employer has time to look for and find a replacement, or prepare for work without the employee
- if the employee is fired, it benefits the employee:
-- they have the time to look for a new job
-- they continue working, receiving salary, and don't have to worry about bills, rent etc.
In both cases the employer and the employee can agree on the actual time when the employee quits: it could be the next day, or next week, or after three months, at the end of the notice period.
It sucks for him, but I hope he learns in future not to sign bad contracts. A day's notice and 2 weeks severance is super bad and I would not have signed it unless the pay was extremely good, as in so good I wouldn't have to worry about getting another job straight away.
EDIT: based on the downvotes many people here could use this advice: DO NOT SIGN BAD CONTRACTS!
https://recruiting.bmwgroup.de/ibs/Servlets/ibs/controller/s...
https://recruiting.bmwgroup.de/ibs/Servlets/ibs/controller/s...
I'm sure Mercedes and Audi would also have similar openings.
> Openly pro-union workers were among those fired this week. Some believe they were targeted.
If you have a low performing employee that you want to get rid of, fine. Arbitrarily destroying the lives of a percentage of your workforce in an annual purge is not OK.
People always seem to put Musk on a pedestal. Personally, I've always been (and always will be) leery of a company run by a PayPal founder.
I am perfectly fine with the idea that someone who isn't doing there job loses it. Where I have a problem is that once a year managers are told to dump their lowest performing people. The reality is that people will game the system. They will hire with the intention of firing. They will fire people who are adversarial either personally or professionally. They will fire people for arbitrary reasons. They will fire people for personal reasons. While tech work is easy to come by right now, it does not mean that the experience will be easy to deal with. Each person who was fired will now have to explain themselves to their families and their prospective employers. I doubt many of them took the job in the first place knowing it was not a stable environment.
Companies that impose forced stack rankings and firing quotas don't exactly have a great track record of avoiding large redundancies in recessions, and indeed due to company-wide underperformance...
I do agree that a "firing quota" is backwards; it should be a standard of performance. But even in a healthy, high-performing company, 1 (or maybe 2) out of 100 people being a drag/net-negative contributor doesn't sound far too off. Ultimately I think it helps the other 98 people to ask those two to leave as soon as it's clear they're not going to become a net positive. If that assessment comes at a specific time of year, so be it; if it's "Okay, we have /n/ heads to chop off, where are they coming from??"... then yeah, not so much.
I had a manager friend whose company went through a "not-layoff" when approx. 2% of the workforce were let go. His group was among the unfortunate ones so he was told to choose one victim among his subordinates - but there was no one with unsatisfactory performance in his opinion. Still he had to choose. Didn't improve his morale that much - he quit shortly afterwards.
The company is out of business now, mainly due to poor and unethical management
Some people became negative because they saw problems they can't resolve by themselves. Maybe don't fire this kind of people?
But, well, it seems some companies just don't care.
Most people considered him kind of a joke before Tesla and SpaceX were mainstream successes.
He's done amazing things with that PayPal money though. I bet a few dozen people on HN have ambitions as big as Elon Musk's but haven't lucked upon an easy $160M cash. He's the proof of what's possible when the right kind of person does.
> Confinity launched its milestone product, PayPal, in late 1999.[1] Confinity merged with X.com, founded by Elon Musk, in March 2000. The merged company became known as X.com because this was thought to be a name with broader long-term potential than Confinity or PayPal. However, surveys showed that a majority of consumers considered the name X.com vague and potentially pornographic and preferred that the company simply be called PayPal. After a corporate restructuring, the company adopted the name PayPal Inc.
They created and launched PayPal, and it took off (i.e. got traction on eBay), before the X.com merger.
> 1999–2000 December–February Customer focus shift Confinity identifies eBay as a promising area to acquire users, because of the high concentration of buyers and sellers and the absence of any standard payment system for them to use.
The only difference is HR strategy. Perhaps they want to signal to the labor market that they're not shy about ridding themselves of second-rate colleagues? I don't like working with second-rate colleagues; it certainly makes me want to work for Tesla.
(Also, patients are customers of the hospital -- you should be comparing this to hospitals firing their worst doctors every year, which IMO, would be fantastic.)
If you like the theme of murder: How would it be different if a prison, rather than executing death row inmates on the first day they were legally permitted, instead delayed their executions so they could bundle them up into annual batches?
Tesla has demanded that firings be carried out at the same rate as average attrition for poor performance, even though those two things have different causes and remedies. People who perform the least-well on their team but are still a (potentially large!) net benefit are generally not fired, but systems like this demand they be.
What's thoroughly disgusting is an employer summarily firing the bottom X% of their workforce, largely because the top management fucked up scheduling and needs to restore investor confidence.
You can't run a German plant like an American one, people will take the 30 day vacations that have been written into their contracts since before he arrived (just because you have a new boss doesn't mean the old contract is invalid), take sick days if they need them (unlimited sick days by law, they don't come out of your vacation time), and go home at 5pm because they value their home/family/free time. Last I checked the factory had at least dozens of positions open that they can't fill because no one here wants to work for them.
It sounds like taking sick days, vacation days, and going home at 5pm is exactly what Musk doesn't want from employees.
Germans are fortunate to have those benefits guaranteed by law (and culture).
Even Adam Smith knew that 'free market' is idealization and don't fit into everything without tweaking. Most non-regulated markets suffer from market failures and contracts have negative externalities. Smith's invisible hand was not all seeing hand.
As a market advocate myself, I approach markets as an economist. They are something can be made to work, but it usually involves mechanism design (= reverse game theory).
Collective bargaining and labor laws can have both positives and negatives. To make it work well requires discretion. Workers competing against each other with lower benefits has some very negative effects for the society.
It's because the free market is a myth, and what actually exists is all kinds of forces playing against each other, using influence, media, money, laws, and the government for their purposes.
Now, the most powerful forces are those of the people with (m/b)illions in the bank, expensive layers, friends in high places and the ability to move their operations wherever they want, and those are rarely people looking for work -- rather they the people looking for employees.
Which is why laws are required. Because a democratic government represents each person equally -- each has one vote, regardless of their wealth (again in theory, like there's no free market, there's also no actual democratic government). So it serves as a counter-balance between small people and big people/coprs (governments can be in bed with big people/corps but they need to pander to small people too in order get their vote).
Add to that, the fact that without any government at all, you don't get anywhere close to a free market either.
At best you'll get the heavier players doing everything they like -- and having private armies and thugs enabling them, to which regular people can just suck it and play along.
This has been the case in some places in developing countries for example, where, while there nominally a government exists, it's so in the pockets of the local moguls that it's just like their private mercenary enforcement force.
>Some guy might not care about 30 days vacation but might prefer more money, as an example.
Without any kind of legal pressure, guys and gals are gonna get neither "30 days vacation" nor "more money".
You're also really cute. Hmm. Let's see ... maybe I can help you if you help me ...
It's all about the power differential.
Sure, people with a long track record or specific skills may have more room to negotiate, but for entry-level and/or unskilled work you'd be unlikely to get more than the minimum enforced by law.
I have a similar reaction to your comment here. It is as if you know exactly nothing about the long history of labor markets. We started out with very unregulated markets, and have moved away from that for very specific historical reasons. You could reasonably argue that any given protection was a step too far, or that a particular regulation no longer makes sense given some sort of change in technology. But just handwaving it away? All of it?
When you say you've "always wondered", I have a hard time believing it. There are many books on this topic. Books, articles, podcasts, movies, blogs, everything. You can learn about the history of labor markets, the theory of it, the present-day reality. Your comment shows no sign of having done the slightest work to understand the topic.
Even if you are not inclined to study history, just try thinking about it as an engineer. Markets aren't magic. They are a specific technology for solving specific economic problems. There are conditions under which they work well, and conditions where they work poorly, sometimes so poorly as to fail. Like any other technology, they come in a variety of specific forms depending on need. They need to be properly installed and maintained if they are to serve the purpose they were created for.
Please go and learn something about this.
That said, tools like collective bargaining and unionization can bring it closer to the market ideal - workers acknowledging and taking advantage of their importance to the business to the same extent as the employer does.
In practice, many external if not anti-free-market factors have made that grouping harder to do.
What is the maximum compensation German courts award for unlawfully firing an worker? Something like 1-4 years salary is my guess.
If Musk want's to fire 2% of German workers every year, he could budget 2 - 8 percent more for his labor cost.
I worked for a German company for over a decade. I don't know if it was due to their culture or their laws, but I never saw anyone get fired for poor performance (except for failing the initial 6-month probation after joining). And it's not like we didn't have low performers — once I got into management it became quite clear that there were a handful of people who were borderline useless, but it was just accepted that they were employees, that the company should look after them just the same, and find work for them to do.
In addition, courts will be siding with the employee in lots of cases, and when the company has a Betriebsrat (workers council) and the Betriebsrat sides with the employee it is next to impossible to get someone fired without serious consequences in court.
People living in fear of their jobs created the most toxic environments.
That itself can affect your performance and motivation. Tough out there.
For example, management can stifle productivity in ways that individual workers have little influence on.
Also, employees may be ‘useless’ for a while, but then improve again, for example if they are going through a divorce, the death of a relative, etc. Firing people because they perform worse for a few months is frowned upon in some circles.
Good management is not, ironically, rocket science.
Very few things in this world are actually simple enough that this kind of dismissive attitude works. I've seen people who didn't care about giving helpful feedback and second chances, but I've also seen people who agree in spirit, but don't know how to do it well.
Having news stories that you are in an underperforming two percent won't help either.
This is a pretty callous move and no surprise it has affected morale.
Sizable companies take a month to bring in a new employee in the best case.
Most hiring managers are skeptical of people fired in a mass "underperformance" firing.
Toss in the fact that most people have never been fired and it's a massive blow to the ego. And also that it's terrible to communicate to your spouse and children that you've been fired for doing a bad job at work. That's a recipe for depression. Which makes it even harder to find work again. Which exacerbates the depression. And you're living on credit. And the bills are piling up. And you are starting to get phone calls.
If you can't jump right into a new job, it's a hard situation to be in, no question about it.
If someone is, they should realize they deliberately chose that situation by failing to adjust for cost of living when comparing employment options.
If they worked at Tesla and lived in Palo Alto, they would need a 5 bedroom house. That's an $8,000/month rental.
The average car payment in the US is $503. One car for dad, one for Mom, one for the teenager. That's $1509. That leaves $1102.48. Take $600 for electricity, water, and trash. That leaves $502.48 each month for food, gas, car insurance, parking, sports, birthdays, christmas, etc.
All of a sudden, Palo Alto doesn't seem so appealing, so the family moves to San Jose where a nice 5BR can be had for $4500. More affordable. The budget isn't so tight. The family can go out to dinner once in a while. They can save $1000/month. But it costs Dad 2-3 hours a day in commuting time. And he shows up late once every couple of weeks because the traffic is atrocious and his hours are set.
Well that pisses his Tesla manager off, so he gets cut as a low performing employee. He gets 2 weeks severance - $5k. He's saved up $5k over the last 6 months. He's not eligible for unemployment because he was fired for cause. He has 30 days to start a new job, at close to $200,000/year, or ... well... he's living on credit. So he takes a job at $150k/year because those are easier to find and he's under pressure.
Now his income is down to $8400/month. To a lot of people, that's still a lot of money. To this guy, he's treading water. It's hard for people to sympathize with this situation. Especially people out of the area with no kids and no debt who could live quite well on that kind of salary. But it's reality for a great many people. Maybe it's not 3 five-hundred dollar car payments. Maybe it's required tutoring. Or helping grandma make her house payment. Or paying for dead-beat brother-in-law's rehab.
Looking around at SV families, I see more people busting their butts to get by than I see buzzing around in sports cars. There are people that are comfortable. There are people that can get by six months without working. I don't think it's a large percentage of the population.
I'm not sure what is better for the employees but often middle managers tend to keep their staff until forced by top management to let someone go.
As for "destroying" lives, I suggest we don't let ourselves get carried away by this. A job is a job; a means to make money. There are other ways to make money, including by taking another job or by starting your own company, which is very realistic for former Tesla engineers.
Just like you are not obliged to buy a Tesla model 3 although you might have bought a Tesla model S beforehand, Tesla is not obliged to buy your services as employees forever and ever. A job is not till death do us part.
As for comment about "arbitrarily" firing people; there is nothing that supports that Tesla did that. Why would they fire people arbitrarily? They are scaling up. The last thing they would do is to fire for the sake of it.
You're also quite likely to alienate or scare a sizable portion of your workforce. Anxiety about getting fired will drive a lot of people to perform worse. Conversely, a feeling that your company will support you during rough times can make those rough times shorter and help productivity.
It's also about diversity. Diversity of life situations, diversity of mental health status, diversity of motivations, etc. etc.
This one seems off, especially noting that some of the fired say they never received a bad review. But it's not yet in that league.
After the (hopefully successful) release of the Model 3, assuming this drives other companies to push forward electic cars, we won't need Tesla to be successful anymore, so I'd expect more people to be critical after that.
In 25 years, I'm sure we'll be saying the same about our current lithium ion chemistries. You engineer with the technology you have, not the future technology you wish you had. ;)
Not just for electric cars, things like cordless tools, lithium-ion versions are much nicer than anything that preceded them.
Bingo! I never quite got the Musk hype train, between how he treats his employees, doesn't respect work life balance, has unrealistic expectations and talks about people not wanting to work for him as less talented, promotes the idea of American exceptionalism etc., I don't see the appeal.
As for his 'accomplishments', he seems to talk a lot and constantly over promise/under deliver. I guess his appeal is that his companies at least approach the exciting territory, which is quite a difference from another 'food delivery startup' of the Valley, but lets not make an average (if electric) car made by Tesla, with plenty of its own, documented QC problems something it is not, just because Musk is involved.
My point being if you have a lot you can risk a lot in absolute terms, but maybe not so in terms relative to your own wealth or well-being.
I don’t think he even risked his reputation with his space rocket thing. ‘Fail fast, etc’, right?
If he hasn't infused the cash, SpaceX at least would have failed. There were a number of finance articles about it at the time "questioning" the odd moves, but paraphrased from Musk, 'If investors are risking their money, shouldn't I be risking mine too?'
If your metric for "enough" is "work to literal death" then I expect you'll continue to be unsatisfied.
* As an investor I would not invest money in Musk's business. It's too risky and ego driven. He finances his endeavors just as creatively as he does technology and takes lots of risk. He is clearly not after money. Money is just tool for him. It's either Mars or bust. Inspiring but not good thing from investor point of view.
* From a technological point of view I admire what Musk has accomplished. His single mindedness has moved space technology forward. He should be admired for what he has done. He has deserved his hype. He has knack of getting things done while stretching everything very close to failure. Even if his businesses fails and he loses everything, that technology is there and others buy it.
* From a humanistic point of view, I understand that Musk will throw people under the bus if they are in the way of his goals. I would not want to be dependent on him any way.
Musk is very typical driven tech industry titan. You have to prioritize. If personal ambition is high, all other issues must come second. Musk, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates all have documented mean streaks towards other people and workers. We should understand that highest level of accomplished very often comes with high human cost. There is a choice.
This is where government regulations should come in.
Musk is not treating people badly because he is malevolent. It's just means to the end. If mistreatment of workers can't be used to gain competitive edge, it stops.
They're pretty brutal. In one case a woman works herself to the point of chronic back pain. They tell her to take as much time as she needs to recover. But when she comes back, her job is gone (they didn't hire someone else, they just eliminated it).
If somebody isn't performing well, I have no idea why I'd wait up to a year to deal with it. And it seems terrible for morale (and PR) to have a regular event where a bunch of people will be let go in one block.
Probably not right during the ramp up of the most critical product in company's history...
Maybe I'm just paranoid but this part kind of smells to me.
> Workers spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared reprisals from the company. Employees said the firings have lowered morale through many departments.
The distribution of noticing problems should be pretty much random, so concentrating the firings in a once-a-year block means a high tolerance for keeping bad employees around. That, or they got rid of these people for reasons not really related to performance.
> Tesla has a hearing before the National Labor Relations Board in November for charges that company supervisors and security guards harassed workers distributing union literature. Tesla denied the accusations.
>Openly pro-union workers were among those fired this week. Some believe they were targeted.
> The company denied union activities played a role in the dismissals.
There are dynamics in blue-collar labor and generally manufacturing that are not relevant to software companies.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/21/apparently-psychopaths-make-...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/15/silicon-v...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_in_the_workplace
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-small-business/wp/201...
Also, I suspect they would react differently if e.g. the mass-laid-off committed mass suicide, whereas I doubt a psychopath would.
This crap from management shouldn't be tolerated, much less celebrated.
I'm not for or against it, but I imagine being one of those workers it would suck.
Still, I'm all for automating as much as possible, and in the case of workforce reductions, gloating over the fact that things move so much more quickly and accurately.
I do like Elon Musks's attitude toward people wasting time. And this is head and shoulders above what goes on in China, India factory conditions. Not saying no one should whine and bitch and moan about it, but truly, it's not all that bad.
1. I had no idea dead weight would be allowed to exist at Tesla.
2. I believe dead weight can be redeemable, if you put in the right effort --not the procedural PIP stuff (which is about improvement as much as incarceration is about rehabilitation) but I mean real effort to rehabilitate a worker. Maybe too much effort for a high flying co.
High demand workers have more opportunities and those that can (the good ones) will find a diff job that does not play this kind of churn game. So I'd thought.
I'm not sure what you mean by `occasional underperformance`? I'm talking about a yearly performance evaluation, in my opinion an overall underperforming for a year is not "occasional", it shows something systemic. The truth is that sometimes we make bad hiring decision (in my group it has been 2-3%). We try to work with them for a few months, set goals, but ultimately you can't always recover everyone.
There's a lot of problems with stack ranking, not least that it discourages cooperation and encourages direct or indirect sabotage (e.g. declining to hire new prospects who you suspect might be better than you). Wikipedia discusses many of the issues: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Vitality_curve
- these weak workers wouldnt otherwise have a job
- these weak workers get an extra year of employment they "dont deserve"
- the strong team members get the 1,2,3 ranks they deserve
- the hiring manager is "forced" to do this
All that said, seems incredibly unfair to hire people directly into the chopping block without the expectation set from the start.
It's a losing situation all around, between the company not getting what it intended (firing the pre-existing dead weight, and getting rid of scapegoats) and, of course, the employees who are duped into joining just to be fired later.
Which companies do this?
Everything about these statements is wrong. Take it from someone who worked at Microsoft before and after they finally smartened up and ditched stack ranking: it's horrible. It creates an atmosphere of paranoia, where people sabotage each other at great cost to the company instead of working together towards common goals. Worse, contra your claim that it weeds out the worst and lets the best rise to the top, what actually happens is the best quickly get sick of the bullshit and leave, while the ones rising to the top are the ones most adept at politics and gaming the system.
Stack ranking has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, and if that's really what Tesla is doing it's enough alone to make me more bearish on them. It's that bad.
But is it working for the rest of us?
https://www.glassdoor.com/Award/Best-Places-to-Work-LST_KQ0,...
The situation for auto workers is very different on both points.
As we get older, that's less and less of an option, and often we have to put up with a job rather than enjoy a job.
Calling real people "dead weight" is insulting and dehumanizing.
On the other hand I believe these people are not dead weight and are redeemable with the right effort.
Then use quotes, that's what they are for. Otherwise you are implying you agree with Tesla corporate vocabulary.
Let's not be hypocrites, at the end of the day it won't change people's fate, however they are still owed a minimum of respect as human beings, they are not mere cogs in the capitalist engine, no matter what Tesla's management thinks.
Parting company should benefit both side. Layoff often come with severance package to give those who were let go time to find another job, at least I hope that's what Tesla does.
no that's just how the employer qualify these people, it doesn't mean these people are responsible for Tesla's shitty management or them missing their financial objectives. They are scapegoats Tesla uses to save face in front of their investors.
Companies will very rarely propose a pay-cut, but more likely they would just rather find someone else. Because they have specific jobs that needs doing and can't afford to have something done poorly.
Even if hiring was perfect there would still be rational reasons to fire sometimes. And hiring is far from perfect.
>No need to label and insult them on their way out
You never need to say when someone didn't do their job, but it's not a terrible thing to do so either. Don't go out of your way to be insulting, but if the basic facts of the situation are insulting, then so be it.
>when you have to tighten your company's belt.
They stated very clearly that it was not about belt-tightening at all. Do you think they're lying?
> Do you think they're lying?
No, no, I implicitly trust all communications from corporate authority figures, of course.
I think it's relevant in a discussion of why a firing occurred. (And that overall discussion has a lot of upvote weight.)
> No, no, I implicitly trust all communications from corporate authority figures, of course.
That's a total deflection. Lack of trust does not let you figure out if any particular statement is true or not. Even dumber than blind trust is to assume everything a corporation ever says is a lie.
So is it your evaluation of the situation that this particular statement is a lie?
I never said that statement was a lie (your word not mine); I have no reason to take their claims at face value either.
So by all means, let's continue talking about how much those loser dead weights who got fired must have sucked.
But corporations are usually very reticent to say negative things about people, so for them to specifically call these people out as bad employees at least makes it plausibly true.
Why do you say that? Of course there are (were?) bad employees. If they did indeed fire the worst performers, some of them were quite likely bad employees.
> But corporations are usually very reticent to say negative things about people, so for them to specifically call these people out as bad employees at least makes it plausibly true.
Also plausible that it's misdirection or that they're assholes. =)
Corporations are poor stewards of our welfare, and trying to coerce them into this role (i.e. minimum wage, healthcare mandate, obligation to hold on to unneeded workers like you propose here) has the nasty side-effect of inhibiting potentially beneficial transactions (pushes employers towards automation, encourages them to split decent full-time jobs into several shitty part-time jobs to stay below eligibility thresholds, locks the lowest-value workers out of the market entirely, keeps the product category well below its potential i.e. taxis, etc).
If we think people should have at least a certain income (and I do), we need higher taxes and a stronger welfare system, not more labor regulation. If we think everyone deserves good healthcare (and I do) we need single-payer, not an employer mandate. If we think people shouldn't have to face loss of income due to economic conditions, we need to strengthen unemployment insurance, not pressure companies to keep workers they don't want or need.
Going down the path of engineering a perfect society by attaching obligations to the employer-employee relationship just disincentives employers from starting those relationships if they can help it.
Labor regulation has the same effect as taxes, the money just doesn't go through the government. Higher taxes and no labor regulation would have similar consequences in corporate profit-seeking decisions, because corporations are the ones paying most taxes anyway.
Besides, there is no clean separation between government and corporations, I think it is improbable that taxes are raised after getting rid of labor regulations.
Not really: taxes are percentage-based. They turn profitable transactions into marginally less profitable transactions, but stop at zero. Minimum wages and benefits set an absolute floor below which the transaction is not worthwhile.
Even if you're not upset about the loss of low-paying jobs (and that's fair), if we think everyone deserves something, getting it should not depend on finding a job.
Also, this sounds straight out of the Ministry of Peace:
"It also said the moves have generally boosted worker morale"
To be fair to the Romans, decimation was a (correct, if the adjective can be used in this case) random process and was limited to the army.
The idea was that when a large group (a cohort or 480 people) severely underperformed (it happened in case of rebellion/mutiny or blatant cowardy), AFTER having executed on the spot those that led the rebellion or that were manifestly coward or leading the mutiny, the remaining were divided in groups of ten, then in each group one was selected by drawing lots, and was executed by the remaining 9 comrades.
This had two advantages (in the eye of the Roman leaders), the army would not have been exterminated (unlike in more "traditional" repression of rebellions) and the 9/10 remaining would have been motivated to contribute to the group.
So, there was not an evaluation of the performance (or non-performance) of the single, the responsability was attributed to the group as a whole, and then out of the 10 people subset the 1 to be killed was chosen by Fate.
In theory I agree and the company should be on the hook to provide training or assistance.
https://www.quora.com/Could-Goldman-Sachs-strategy-of-firing...
I think Barclays also used to do it.
It's shitty thing to do to people. But you don't need me to tell you they're shitty companies.
This has little to do with performance or any conspiracies. If your output of products is about to dramatically shift there is no reason to think employment should remain stable among all departments. I would guess if shifting a company's labor requirements was more politically correct, the shift would be much larger.
The average pundits head might just explode trying to rationalize the juxtaposition of a clean tech company increasing production rapidly yet 'firing' hundreds. The rational, however, applaud these efforts and the difficult decisions this requires.
Among all departments, of course not. But the job of administration and sales for the old model of car is a tremendously close match to administration and sales for the new model. If they didn't have a sufficiently large desire to fire these people, they would transfer most or all of them over.
The solarcity firings would possibly represent a shift in labor requirements, but even then they are strongly denying it with the claims of performance-based firings and not layoffs.
If they were focused on 1 factory that would be weird - if they were company wide that would be within the bounds of normalcy.
Can anyone illuminate?
Musk set Tesla up for failure and now the non-management people have to suffer as a result. The fact that this is even being talked about right now may hurt Tesla's chances of hiring great future employees...especially with that scathing article basically saying they were being fired for bad performance and not laid off.
Can you still get unemployment if you are fired for unsatisfactory performance?