Charitably, this is a mistake in communication. Tesla should fix this immediately though, because it doubles down on the poor impressions formed by breaking county (IIRC) law when restarting their factories.
Besides, it just doesn't ring true to me. Had this been intentional, they would have been far more careful and not set themselves up for the most predictable made-for-media firing scandal you could possibly envisage. Companies deal with firings all the time, they know to avoid this sort of thing. That's basically the point of an HR department.
If accidental, and assuming a continuous-improvement policy within the company, it could also be an opportunity to understand how the wrongful terminations took place.
Like Tesla calling their driving assistance “auto-pilot”.
https://www.tesla.com/autopilot
You’re right Tesla is guilty of marketing features that don’t exist today but will “in the future”.
But hey they disclose the truth in the fine print (Autopilot is not autonomous), so nothing to see and god forbid we accurately call it what it is “driver assist“ instead of autopilot or even the as of yet non-existent “full self driving”:
“Current Autopilot features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous.”
>The workers... said they both received the notices last week from Tesla's human resources department citing their apparent failure to show up and the company's inability to reach them. The workers provided evidence of their continuing correspondence with managers.
Communicating directly with managers is not the same as communicating with HR; it seems like HR opened up a big list of people who hadn't clocked in in x days and sent them all termination-unless-you-say-otherwise notices.
The question I don't see answered in this article: Did HR communicate an end to the unpaid leave arrangement? I won't contend that that should have been clear from the start, since the situation changes by the day; but at least a little bit of "We're starting to wind down the unpaid leave program based on guidance from county authorities about the safety of ... etc, please arrange to resume your work by $Date,"
Not to mention the CEO was actually breaking the law by reopening, in practice this worked out to violate the law by coming to work or get fired...
And it’s not about musk breaking the law...it’s about him telling his employees to break the law and firing those that didn’t...did musks lawyers advise them as well?
That’s a straw man...the CEO fired people who didn’t break the law at his direction. He didn’t give a damn if the employees felt the law was just or not. Forcing employees to break the law or fire them is absolutely wrong.