California Opens Investigation into Tesla Workplace Conditions
bloomberg.com
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Damn, so workers were afraid to speak up and spread the injury info because they were forced to sign an NDA and we’re worried about being sued. I think somebody needs to do something about this NDA situation, it’s getting out of control in SV
Not just in SV, it's all over the world. IMHO the right of protection for whistleblowers should be made a basic human right, in order to protect people worldwide who are afraid to speak out.
We’ve seen plenty of companies that shrug off large fines and such. Whatever the rules, it has to reach the point of being seriously unprofitable to disobey (i.e. investors knocking to demand compliance).
For a worker without this safety net there really isn't reason for them to violate an NDA and have to rely on whistleblower protections for future remidial damages if there isn't a guarantee that their current living situation would be able to be maintained. We saw last week how Apple fired leakers on the spot and have their name blacklisted towards future tech employers as such.
As someone who grew up in a paycheck-to-paycheck household, you generally can't endure too much boat rocking. The ability to whistleblow takes a huge hit to your pocketbooks. If you don't have a pocketbook to begin with, it can be an extreme hardship.
Now, if every company in the world had the legal requirement to add a paragraph like "in the event that you witness illegal behavior at the company, the law explicitly allows you to report such behavior to media, unions, NGOs and public offices, and we are required to pay you for the duration of the investigation", that would be a different story. Everyone who reads his/her contract would know it.
If something illegal is happening, California law provides that NDAs are not enforceable when in conjunction with some criminal acts. Furthermore, NDAs can’t protect against a witness being subpoenaed or being required to testify in a court proceeding.
California whistleblower laws are also quite clear on the matter. It isn’t “getting out of control.”
It’s very possible that a reporter is using the existence of an NDA to imply something that can’t be confirmed or refuted. Remember, reporters are ambitious and have inherent bias as well. Just because someone doesn’t want to go on the record doesn’t mean they are acknowledging a problem. They might just genuinely not want to talk to reporters.
> It was difficult to find employees to go on the record.
Almost every employee at every company signs an NDA when they start working. Oftentimes NDAs and other employment documents (Non-Compete clauses etc) are chock full unenforceable information. Most people agree because there's no ability to negotiate these documents, because they don't understand the clauses or because they don't know they're unenforceable.
It doesn't matter if parts of a contract are unenforceable, because the rest of it still is, so you may as well put as much bullshit in and hope nobody notices.
In New Zealand, this is a big problem with rental contracts. Landlords and real estate agents will put a bunch of clauses that they know are unenforceable in the contract and hope you don't notice. Most people will think that they are enforceable though because they're in the contract. Usually I know better, but rather than bring it up with the agents at signing time, I've found the easiest thing to do is to just ignore the clauses, and when they try to enforce it, I tell them to pound sand.
Jimmy John's used to have their sandwich-making employees sign non-competes. They buckled on this since then, but this article details it with some other policy examples:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/15/upshot/when-the-guy-makin...
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/04/06/600412430/epis...
Silicon Valley has a few other companies like that, Uber and Twitter being the most prominent.
Superior tech can really kill Tesla, though, if they don't get with it. Little cylindrical batteries aren't necessarily the future in that space, it is definitely not a given that their autonomous tech will be a big winner, and BMW's inexpensive carbon fiber is a thing of awe and wonder that Tesla has no answer for. And there's always the outside chance that Toyota is onto something about fuel cells...
BWM appears to be going all-in on 3D printing--which makes sense given their volumes. At practically every conference where non-hobby 3D printers appear, BMW is always a real customer of those companies.
To my mind, BMW is the most dangerous company to Tesla.
> doesn't grasp how smaller is the luxury market share
this is the investors tesla scam depends on. this and a million people thinking they could flip a model3 reservation for a profit.
Tesla doesn't do well at the things a non-novelty luxury car maker needs to do well, and EVs are only luxury cars now due to novelty.
Agreed. I own a Leaf and absolutely love it to death, but it just is not a $35,000 car. I'd have never bought mine for full MSRP, even with all the money in the world. However once these cheap little EV's with 20-30kWh batteries drop to the range of ~$15k new (which I have no doubt will be within 5 years, based on battery price forecasts) it's going to become a no-brainer for most urban people.
Interesting.
Can you explain both their (presumed) reasoning, and the indicators you see?
I think this is dead on. People are expecting Tesla to be the GM of EV's but that's never going to happen. GM will be the GM of EV's. Bolt and Nissan Leaf have both far outsold all Tesla models combined, and that's not even a fraction of the worldwide EV fleet that exists now. There are over a dozen competitors to Model 3 at this point.
And Android phones are for more numerous than iPhones. My point here is just that pure number of units sold does not determine a company's value.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/8d7khd/were_two_inves...
> Have you investigated any other auto manufacturer?
> (ajpreports) I haven't nor has Will. But maybe that's our next venture!
That diminishes their credibility a lot in my mind. This is a type of investigation that should be done by people with experience in the area. Especially on a company that pushes the envelope like Tesla.
https://www.propublica.org/podcast/how-a-reporter-pierced-th...
I don't know the truth here, but I would be surprised if the other car companies are behaving better. That was my point: How do these reporters know that the other factories do not underreport injuries the same way? If they have never done this before, they wouldn't know. So it appears as if they picked on Tesla.
The Reveal reporters are making a claim about Tesla’s worker safety practices, and they have experience covering these issues. Why don’t you think that experience is relevant in the car making domain?
More to the point, Reveal’s story isn’t claiming that Tesla is misreporting injuries more than other car makers. It claims Tesla is misreporting injuries, full stop. It doesn’t require comparison.
Some folks are still not aware that these practices lower productivity. shrug
I left because the space industry moves at quite a slow pace compared to the rest of the software world and I was tired of working on one small piece of software while the world was changing around me...
All in all? SpaceX was pretty wonderful and I don’t think anyone should judge employee happiness solely from hours worked. I was frequently encouraged to take some recharge time for me. This is just one data point and maybe we’re all only hearing the negative data points?
Would love it if you could shed some more light on this point :)
Was it that you were using an old programming language or something? It's hard for me to believe that the space industry didn't present some pretty awesome opportunities to use your brain. Sometimes building CRUD apps with the latest X framework is just too damn easy.
Work hours are very long at SpaceX but they tell you that up front.
In fairness, Musk says they will eventually be as reliable, and as high quality as others and it'll be cheaper.. one day. That's the common NIH fallacy though.
The advantage of keeping much knowledge in-house is that you are not subject to extortion campaigns (e.g. the Prevent/VW dispute. In addition you
- are always exposing your internal knowledge to the part vendor and have to rely on the vendor protecting your IP from other customers, so "inventing here" works out better.
- are not bound to endless rounds of waterfall development. Tesla is heavily agile from what can be seen in reports... keeping communications (and decisions!) short saves money and especially time. Where time is Teslas biggest issue - just like a Tesla will kill almost anything at a drag race, eventually the gas-powered engine will win as it can go to higher speeds... and this is even more valid in terms of production. Tesla absolutely has to develop rapidly so they can get an established mass production e-car before Mercedes, BMW, VW and especially Toyota catch up and fly past Tesla.
- have to factor in margins for the vendors and by extension also their refinancing cost - Tesla gets shovelled with cheap cash, a vendor must build production lines with significantly more expensive capital. This adds up especially over many years...
- have less issues if something goes bad. For the old model, if a defect turns up it's usually a complex and long negotiation process where each side wants to avoid assuming blame (and thus costs). For Tesla, this cost risk falls away for all parts they manufacture in-house.
- have less probability for a catastrophic fuck up, I'd say. While a vendor has to "save face" and so has the incentive to e.g. hide issues that crop up during development or, worse, production from the customer (in order to avoid delay or other fines), the incentive for a Tesla-internal department is much less, as there are no delay fines.
... and thus very vulnerable to strikes or arbitrary price hikes. Yes, a seat is a seat, but once you're locked in into a vendor, you are locked in.
Tesla wants to avoid lock-ins as far as possible and especially something where a switch to a different manufacturer is as difficult as a seat. You can switch a vendor for a simple plastic part in a matter of days if the need arises (and the 3D data for the forming process is your IP), or do multi-vendor sourcing from the start - but try switching your seat vendor, that ain't gonna be cheap nor in a reasonably fast time frame.
> Yes, a seat is a seat, but once you're
> locked in into a vendor, you are locked in.
If it's easy for other car manufacturers at much bigger scales why would it be an issue for Tesla?
On the outside, it is a seat. What is different between manufacturers, and even between cars: dimensions of the components, abilities of the seat (e.g. how many degrees of movement, heating, massage functions), the attachment of the seat to the car itself, the form of the seat... if you want to switch the seat vendor, you have to account for weeks if not months until the new vendor delivers the same final product.
> If it's easy for other car manufacturers at much bigger scales why would it be an issue for Tesla?
They don't switch or only switch at model "refreshments", which is at odds with Teslas always-improving workflow.
If they have professional supply chain and commercial departments they'll have contingencies in place for situations like this.
Even companies as massive as VW can not handle such a situation (as evidenced last year: https://www.ft.com/content/ffd3ee62-6934-11e6-a0b1-d87a9fea0...).
And they've brought in house more since then (like the seats).
citation needed.
That said, I don't think it's necessarily a huge strike against Tesla; they're at a different scale and at a different stage in the life of the company.
Of course, there's also the matter of what the manufacturer is willing to show you (perhaps we didn't visit the forklift floor at BMW!), and also BMW is highly space constrained building cars right in the heart of Munich.
CFRP + Aluminum, similar volumes as what Tesla was targeting.
That's cool stuff, thank you!
The only upside is their stated unemployment rate is sitting around 3.5%.
Wow. That sounds like something Hannity or Trump would say. Is Musk losing it?
The United Automotive Workers union is hardly an "extremist organization".
Additionally, the Reveal journalist said on Reddit that many of the people interviewed were indeed "union supporters" (the words Musk specifically used), but also said that not all of them were, such as Tesla's former safety manager.
The "extremist" part may be debatable or an exaggeration, but the other parts had carefully chosen words and were not inaccurate.
Turns out they were a finalist not the winners. The difference is here: http://www.pulitzer.org/page/frequently-asked-questions (no. 23). 3 finalists are chosen by that category jury from the submissions and one winner is picked by the board from that.
Good info though. Thanks.
Reveal was also a finalist in 2013 (back when it was named California Watch) for the award in public service (generally considered the most prestigious of the Pulitzers): http://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/california-watch
However, I'm not surprised there is no single person putting her name on this blog post.
Having said that, I can imagine that unions are disliked here on HN / in the US due to various reasons. In the end, from what I witness, they care significantly for human rights across companies. If they weren't there, companies would squeeze out life of the low-end workers at a significantly higher rate, than they already do.
It's a funny thing: Move fast and break things. This basically stops working, when 'things' are humans.
[1]: https://www.revealnews.org/article/tesla-says-its-factory-is...
I’ve had a friend, a specialist engineer doing failure analysis, who has been largely incapacitated from any work because of Tesla. He sustained an injury during a high urgency project (which failed, whodathunk) which required him to work 16 hour days for a few months. During the course of this, he sustained injuries to arms and legs due to machinery issues (the machinery at Tesla often has workers contorting into unnatural positions, I’ve heard). It’s been 2 years and my friend is unable to pay for the requisite operations and can’t get a cent out of Tesla. He is unable to work because of his injuries and so really has been confined to his home for 2 years now.
I have no respect for Musk. An employer who has no respect for their employees, a leader who has no regard for those he leads, is morally bankrupt and seeks only their own good.
There's an entire sub-industry of attorneys specializing in fighting insurers/companies on worker comp cases.
Unpaid overtime for warehouse workers? Definitely, as long as the worker doesn't squawk to L&I! Work your developers 10 hours a day, then guilt trip them to coming in on Sunday? Amazon does this constantly. Tesla, SpaceX and Blue Origin seem to have the same work culture as Amazon, even Microsoft or Adobe have better work cultures.
Oh, and Musk is all too happy to intimidate employees: https://www.thedailybeast.com/workers-say-tesla-is-trying-to...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-job...
Take a look through recent articles about Amazon: https://www.qwant.com/?q=amazon overwork employees&t=news&freshness=all
There's a lot to dislike about bigcorps, but the working environment isn't one of them.
With all that said, the reality is that you can't take a single brush and paint companies that have so many employees with it. The experience varies very widely on which part of the company they are in.
I'm sure parts of Microsoft are wonderful to work at. Just like I'm sure parts of Amazon are wonderful to work at (they have numerous awards as well indicating this: #1 by LinkedIn this year, for example). I wish we'd stop taking articles that point out the experiences of a couple people to mean that is the situation at the company. Report the full story, not click-bait articles.
Has your friend spoken to news agencies about this? Why not, if he/she hasn't? Surely any of the major news agencies would be watering at the mouth for a story like this.
Take a look for yourself: https://www.qwant.com/?q=tesla%20workers&t=news
I looked, it's an exaggeration to say every week.
Also, the subtext of your comment - that this person OF COURSE would have contacted a news organization if their claim was legitimate is frankly very weird.
What I (not the original poster of the comment you are questioning) is that they were injured in the workplace at Tesla as en employee and unable to get anything from Tesla to deal with that, since workers compensation is a bright-line legal requirement for all employers and covers all employees.
Now, bureaucratic difficulties dealing with Tesla’s WC insurer resulting in annoying runarounds, poor doctors in inconvenient locations, and disappointing care quality would be credible. Crickets, though, stretches belief.
Extended legal action may very well be why there aren't big stories about this.
Yes, all California employers are required to offer workers compensation benefits, and to inform employees about their rights under workers comp law.
A few years ago most of the comments here would have been much more sycophantic. It's very refreshing to see.
edit: Ok maybe it's not completely gone yet.
So personally, I read comments like yours and wonder who you are and why you feel it is necessary to be critical of that motive.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/29/17178086/facebook-growth-...
It's still super helpful. We need to advance our tech at all costs. It's the only thing we have on this continent. We've gifted foreign nations with our manufacturing industries and gutted the American middle class, and the entrails have been used to lift 250,000 people a day out of poverty since 1990. This is a serious gift and a serious tragedy at the same time.
Now there is nothing good about herniated disks from 16 hours of holding your arms over your head every day. I am not defending that. But you have to put it in perspective. Things are so damn good all the frigging time in America and Canada, _relatively speaking_, that we look at herniated disks from hard work like it's some great tragedy that should net each suffering worker $400,000 and a couple years off. But if you lived in China you'd be faced with taking zero dollars, or going to prison for complaining, or getting caught in one of the suicide nets on the sides of Foxconn.
So what's it going to be, guy? Are we going to stifle our tech because we aren't willing to break eggs to make an omelette? Or are we going to let go of our hatred for the tall poppy and let him do his job?
Let me finish by saying that Elon Musk inspired me to move to the big city and get a comp sci education 3 years ago, at this point I am now an intermediate-level dev with great prospects and without Elon Musk striking inspiration and courage in my heart I would be much more bitter and resentful and lame than I am now. So I will defend him to the end of the Earth for setting such a shining and glorious example for me to follow.
We might not be able to stop all workplace injuries, and I totally agree that Elon Musk has accomplished a lot in his all of his ventures to date; however, if Musk’s path to future success requires further harm towards his customers and/or his employees, then I’d rather wait for someone else to accomplish the same without any lives being in jeopardy.
If this is he primary directive, then what kind of business practices wouldn't be justified?
vs.
"...Tesla failed to report serious injuries on legally mandated reports to make its numbers appear better than they actually were."
Now use Occam's Razor.
Somehow I doubt that will result in less disagreement.
Unions, conventional automobile companies, and the oil industry are all terrified of electric cars. EVs mean less jobs, less parts, longer renewal cycles, and of course removing inflexibility from oil demand. EVs threaten industries collectively totaling trillions of dollars and in some cases even double digit percentages of nations' GDPs. It's absurd and naive to think these industries would do nothing.
... but Tesla is a corporation, and corporations act in their self-interest. Corporations (and governments and other large entities too) routinely omit negative information, cook their numbers, ignore problems, over-reach, and generally push boundaries in their race for profit, power, and status. As good as Tesla's mission is, I don't necessarily expect it to behave better than a standard issue corporation.
Conventional auto industries only implemented safety in vehicles and in factories after being repeatedly whacked upside the head. They still don't hesitate to ignore safety overseas when they can get away with it, nor do they hesitate to destroy the economic well being of entire regions of the country to save a bit on short term costs or flout environmental regulations.
Tesla is new, so they'll probably need to get whacked around a bit too. But I still hope they are successful because their mission is good for humanity in the long term. Continued reliance on oil is an existential risk to the human race.
I think that Tesla’s worker treatment problems should absolutely be addressed but I wouldn’t be so sure that unions are the answer.
It's not even like they are acting the same as the rest of the industry. Directly in the article it says that they have much higher injury rates than the rest of the industry. Either make the environment safer or at least give the workers enough equity that they benefit from pushing the company through as well. It's pretty disenguous for a rich guy like Elon to say that this is losing money now, so everyone has to sacrifice, when he's going to reap the benefits of that sacrifice
Regardless though, employees fight for unions in the US only when it's become really bad. There's such a baseline hatred of unions that you can't casually get one going here just by saying you might be able to get more money. Tesla might not have the capital to impeove things directly but they could at least hand out more equity to the employees so that their incentives aligned.
https://www.revealnews.org/article/tesla-says-its-factory-is...
> Reveal compared records from Tesla’s internal tracking system, obtained from a source, with the official logs, which were requested by an employee and provided to Reveal.
Hi there, we did this reporting completely independently of the union.
This is another instance of deceptive Tesla wording, when Tesla says:
working directly with union supporters
what they mean is that some of the workers Reveal interviewed were in the union. Of course some of the interviewees weren't tied to the union but those go unmentioned.
I appreciate what Tesla did to popularize electric cars, but everything else isn't that great.
I really enjoy not needing a car and don't enjoy driving, even a nice one.
The various reports of low quality of Tesla's cars (like their doors :/ ) have also contributed to suppress any tesla envy.
If I really needed a car right now, I would start by comparing the different ones on the market, Tesla is not the only player in town anymore.
The view you espoused is fairly common but I don't understand why UAW would lead to poor quality cars when cars are designed and built using standardized procedures with machines that perform the same each time (not a rhetorical question, I really don't understand where this view comes from)
Citation please.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/business/28auto.html
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2007/11/15/business/15auto.html
Closest I can get you since all the journal articles are from conservative-leaning institutions with a vested interest against unionization. All three articles are about the new contracts UAW signed in 2007 as the auto industry was collapsing in the United States, all of which cite massive concessions back to the auto companies. Notably, Ford still got to fold 10 of their original 16 plants scheduled for closure, GM got to shift away massive healthcare obligations, and Chrysler managed to substantially reduce their employment guarantees.
If you were a union interested in a happy balance between company and employee rather than just making your employees score every short-term dollar that they could, you wouldn't need to concede like this with one, let alone every, major United States-founded auto maker.
It's worth noting that GM actually got the biggest haul up front since they got the opportunity to negotiate first.
This being a real-world situation, it should be possible to figure out what's really going on, which is what California seems to be doing. No reason to make unwarranted assumptions either way in the mean time.
...is what I would say if I were Montgomery Burns. Tesla's PR people must be thinking it's better to win over the tiny Burns demographic and not the millions of Homer Simpsons out there.
vs
"Neptune is breathing, and so the ocean goes up and down, just like when you are in the tub and take a deep breath"
Now use Occam's Razor.
If you were unaware of the persistent activities of various organizations then you might think that unions creating false information is an absurd idea, just as you might feel about the tides if you were a simple peasant, ignorant of the work of physicists.
I highly recommend watching the Coppola film “Tucker, A Man and His Dream.”
Valuing mans dream and ambitions over people he hurts on a way is wrong ethics. People who cancel on dreams when they are causing damage are superior.
Maybe you should read about the allegations? He's under attack for abusing his workers. This is a good reason to be pissed off, and a good reason _not_ to hope for his success.
That's an important word, since it does not mean that he is convicted of doing so. If investigation immediately meant guilt, the world would be a very different place.
/s
It seems like everything worth doing nowadays results in someone hating you.
The most worthy path is the one that helps the most people. Not coincidentally, each of those people you've helped, becomes a supporter of yours, in some capacity. You become popular. So the worthy path ends up being the popular path.
That doesn't mean the popular path is always the worthy path. People can become popular for really stupid reasons and without really helping anybody. I actually think Musk is such a person; I literally don't think any of his projects are "worth doing" and you are just gonna have to grant me my opinion there. So if I'm not impressed with his outlandish narcissistic persecution-fantasy of extremist groups being out to get him, it's not because he's doing something worth doing, it's because he's NOT.
No, not in the least. Especially when the things that make people mad, in this case, treating your workers horribly, are entirely avoidable.