Elon Musk to Workers: Violate California's Stay-at-Home Order or Don't Get Paid | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk to Workers: Violate California's Stay-at-Home Order or Don't Get Paid

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32 pointsdoener11 comments

So the factory is opening back up and he is saying that he will not be paying people who do not show up to work. I understand there is a pandemic but I do not understand why it is on the company to pay people who are not working. The whole premise of a company is that individual work is used collectively to get higher returns than the individuals contribute, if you're not contributing to that collective you don't deserve your portion of the pay from that company. I agree the government needs to step in and help, but the company should not be responsible for paying individuals out of pocket.

The real story here to me is that, depending on your state, you are required to go to a work environment you believe to be unsafe because you'll be kicked off unemployment otherwise. Living in a red state, it seems like we are going to be taking the herd immunity route. Personally, I think we should be supporting high risk individuals and have them quarantine while the rest of society goes back to a quasi-normal. This is based off the rate of asymptomatic individuals being so large that the mortality rate is at least an order of magnitude smaller than previously believed.

A direct of mine a while ago said something very simple that blew my mind a bit:

> "Minimum wage is a privatized social safety net".

America's social structures are designed around a presumption that one should be working, and if one is not working you better be in a group "deserving" of aid. This is a concept that you can trace back to at least the Elizabethan poor law (1601), which aimed to provide poor houses for the infirm, work for the able bodied, and threatened to imprison the "idle" poor.

> I understand there is a pandemic but I do not understand why it is on the company to pay people who are not working.

The issue is not the Tesla is obligated to pay people who are not working, it is that (1) violating the shelter-in-place order is a crime, and (2) paying someone to commit a crime is also generally unlawful, and also (3) imposing adverse employment consequences, including reduced pay, for refusing to commit a crime is generally also unlawful.

(Of course, Tesla itself is violating the order and committing a crime by reopening, but #3 particularly is an avenue by which individual workers, as opposed to just public authorities, may have a claim against Tesla based on their unlawful acts.)

My understanding was that this is not a law, but a policy. This comment actually had me read up a bit on this, here's an interesting article[1] (I have no idea how credible the source is, but at a glance it seems to be relatively unbiased).

The take away I have is that there is some debate over this, but we don't seem to have quarantine laws in place to handle large scale quarantine.

[1] https://californiaglobe.com/section-2/does-gov-newsom-have-t...

As I’ve said before, the legal liability of this is pretty problematic. We’re not sure what the liability for employers is if they follow the rules, but with Tesla explicitly ignoring a legal order to stay closed, any worker who gets fired or gets sick surely has even better grounds to sue.

Now is also a good time to point out that Musk is basically uninsurable; Tesla lost (or cancelled) their director insurance, and is currently being insured by Musk personally.

Edit: Tesla is also continuously fending off pushes by UAW to unionize his factories. A message of “break the law or don’t get paid” isn’t going to help his goal of keeping his factories non-union.

Elon musk is an asshole and he needs to go to jail for this

It isn't news that he is an asshole. The way he decided to handle the "pedo guy" incident, from the double down to the weaseling out, leaves no room for doubt.

The news here is the blatant disregard for the law.

The headline is a bit misleading and presumptuous.

While I get Musk is the owner of the company and probably tells the plant supervisors what to do in this situation, there is literally _nothing_ in this article that mentions anything about Musk directly telling employees "you work or no unemployment"...

Pretty bad headline IMO - just used for shock value.

> there is literally _nothing_ in this article

Nothing? On the very page are the following quotes attributed to the letter which seems to be signed by Musk:

"“If you do not feel comfortable coming into work, you can stay home and will be on unpaid leave,” Musk wrote in an email obtained by The Guardian."

"“Choosing not to report to work may eliminate or reduce your eligibility for unemployment depending on your state’s unemployment agency.”"

> “If you do not feel comfortable coming into work, you can stay home and will be on unpaid leave,” Musk wrote in an email

"unpaid leave" is literally the definition of "Don't Get Paid". The headline itself doesn't say anything about unemployment.

However it does quote from his email a bit further down which says

> Choosing not to report to work may eliminate or reduce your eligibility for unemployment

Whilst it's not directly "you work or no unemployment", I think most people reading it would take that implication, no?

Can't wait to see what a judge thinks about this.

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