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Comment by ProfessorLayton | Hacker News Reader

It’s interesing that the company can just decide not to report this as a mass layoff. While the performance reasons for letting someone go may be true, it seems like an easily exploitable loophole.

Model 3 production rates were missed by a wide margin, so at least a few people should have known that management would react.

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Company's don't get to decide. It is written in law. Check the WARN act, but the key threshold seems to be 500 workers at a single facility.

As an employer, getting rid of your worst 1% of workers once a year is just housekeeping.

While it is common amongst companies to remove some % of lower performing individuals, or housekeeping as you have phrased, it is important to note that there is a distinction between being fired due to performance and being laid off.

The former is your fault as the employee, the latter is due to larger business conditions and generally recognized as no immediate fault of your own. In real world terms, you can be personally fired for not doing your job and can be laid off because the company can't afford to keep your plant/office/division running due to outside conditions.

<500 people, it might be too small to count as a mass layoff.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retrai...

Do public company actually have an obligation to report mass layoffs?

Yes, it's the WARN act:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...

California also has their own version: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-...

For qualifying situations

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retrai...

Yes. By law, they have to report it, esp in CA

Per Chapter 4, Part 4, Sections 1400-1408 of the Labor Code, WARN protects employees, their families, and communities by requiring that employers give a 60-day notice to the affected employees and both state and local representatives prior to a plant closing or mass layoff.

http://www.edd.ca.gov/Jobs_and_Training/Layoff_Services_WARN...

The word “layoff” appears nowhere in this report. The words used are “fired” “dismissals” and “firing”. This is a completely different activity than laying off.

To elaborate further, "firing" makes sense if Tesla is pinning its low Model 3 production numbers on inefficient and/or incompetent staff.

So they say. I imagine straight termination for "performance" reasons (even people who self-report as never having previous bad reviews) differs from layoffs in any company-declared or regulatory obligations. Unemployment insurance might be one.

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