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Comment by burger_moon | Hacker News Reader

>Tesla, however, says this is part of a planned period of downtime that was similar to another shutdown in February, and it isn’t intended to have an affect on the company’s current production targets for the car.

This seems like a story that is being pushed just because sites know it will drive clicks but the actually news is well not really news.

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The original article said this:

> The announcement of the four- to five-day production pause for the Model 3 came without warning, according to Tesla employees who spoke with BuzzFeed News. During the pause, workers are expected to use vacation days or stay home without pay; a small number of workers may be offered paid work elsewhere in the factory.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/tesla-model-3-prod...

Wow. Tesla's really bad to their employees.

Well that's a bit more damning than what I read. That's a really shitty practice to do to their employees.

joblesness on demand

Many of those workers have probably been racking up the overtime, so the break shouldn't be bad financially and good for the mental health. But to do it without warning is really shitty: a little bit of warning would have let a proper vacation be planned. You know that vacation requests will be denied once it gets started again.

Jeez.

Most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck with less than $1000 cash in the accounts, and you think being forced to miss a week's pay with no notice isn't bad financially.

That's not what he said. He said that bc they have been working a lot of overtime lately, their paycheck will probably work out to be around the same as they would normally get. He also said it was shitty that they did it without warning.

But you already knew that. There's no reason to falsey attribute malice to what someone says just to flamebait.

No, what he said is they might average the same as their normal pay check but that doesn't mean that what they earn normally is necessary enough and that overtime is some kind of fun money.

What the person you responded to has pointed out is that a lot of workers do not earn enough to have savings. So waving away loss of income in such situations as just spending some money you might have earned previously is not exactly nice.

People who work in these types of industries _expect_ these work stoppages. Though obviously it's preferable to have a heads-up.

I have family members working on the new Vogtle Nuclear Power plants in Georgia. Week to week they never know for sure whether they'll be working 7 days, 3 days, or 0 days. Managers do try to plan work stoppages ahead of time, but it's not always practical or possible and workers know this. Except for the most junior guys everybody understands you need to prepare for stoppages, though that doesn't prevent many from crying foul. Wage workers do have it tough, but it's also true that poor planning skills exacerbate the situation, and all the overtime means you can't really compare the situation to a part-time, minimum wage worker who couldn't save money even if they tried.

These kind of mindtricks to justify situations where workers are fucked is exactly the reason why I support laws that protect workers from this.

The other thing that I find really odd about American working conditions is that it seems quite routine for leave requests to be cancelled. What if you've already booked a holiday, or promised family you'll go somewhere?

Apple rumour sites always giddily report cancelled leave requests. I find it bizarre.

But don't you know that unions are extremist organizations? And there's a yellow pole in Tesla factory!

It's hard to say, given how Tesla spins things sometimes, though. That said, a stoppage like this COULD be totally normal.

Seems to be the tactic of 90% of the news sites these days.

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