She would be in a totally different situation if she had a tape of Tesla's AGC threatening her friends through their immigration status. That is straight up mafia tactics.
Brings to mind this case [1].
With criminal statutes, it significantly raises the bar about how to "leak" something to the press, the press who needs to verify the source and can be subpoena'd for records.
A private person recording someone illegally is a crime. In some circumstances (for instance to prove a witness in lying), it can still be admissable. [ref https://www.stimmel-law.com/en/articles/secret-recording-con....]
Now is it is worth admitting to a crime that can carry fines of up to $2,500 and/or imprisonment for up to a year (misdemeanor) is a hefty question. In addition, the violator may be subject to civil liability in the amount of $5,000 or three times the amount of any actual damages sustained as a result.
If this was a lawsuit due to serious, career ending malfeasance against you, where a key witness would be trivially proven a liar and you could end up with millions in a settlement? Maybe? Could they turn around and sue you for 3x the settlement? Sounds like you'd want to talk to a lawyer first.
Not happening most of the time though.
We shouldn't be afraid.
I personally sued big corporations, as an individual, two times, and won. Granted, this was in Europe, not the US, but the warnings and hand-waving of people telling me one should never do that were similar.
If you care enough about the issue, and don't care much about the risks, which are usually wildly exaggerated, the odds are actually in your favor.
The article suggests that unlawful recording is the criminal act that Tesla is alleging she committed.
From an article mentioned in the LA Times article
> She considered leaving Tesla, but fellow engineers convinced her to stay. “I promised them I [would] get to Elon one way or the other,” she wrote, “even if I [had to go] to the Supreme Court.”
I would understand from a corporate perspective Tesla wanting to remove this person. A company, especially one on the brink of bankruptcy as Tesla was in 2014 has to have a high degree of cohesion and minimal dissent from employees.
> Instead, Balan said, she was forced to resign, an event that launched a six-year legal journey leading to where she is today: about to face off against Tesla — on her own, without an attorney — in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
I can't understand how someone can be let go from a company and make it their life's work over the next 6 years to grieve and fight publicly. Right or wrong, it seems like an utterly destructive process on the personal level.
> Balan says her professional reputation suffered damage so severe she can’t find a company willing to hire her. “They tell me, ‘We’d like to hire you, but we can’t afford to be on Musk’s blacklist,’” she said.
Employers aversion to hiring Balan may have to do with her lawsuit, at least a little bit
Weeks earlier, in a companywide email, Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk had dumped on the concept of corporate hierarchy. Find “the fastest way to solve a problem to the benefit of the whole company” and don’t worry about your boss, he told them. Go straight to the top, if need be. Balan took him up on it.
I had a department head tell us his door is always open and to contact him about stuff (company policy supports the open door policy). I took him up on it. When I showed up, he had another manager there in addition to himself (it was supposed to be a scheduled meeting with just me and him). I was later rated poorly, both in an interview and at year end, for a lack of leadership (following the hierarchy).
https://thehustle.co/hot-cheetos-inventor/
> In the video, Enrico encouraged every worker at the company to “act like an owner.” Most employees brushed it off as a management cliché; Montañez took it to heart.
> “Here’s my invitation… here’s the CEO telling me, the janitor, that I can act like an owner,” he later recalled. “I didn’t know what I was going to do. Didn’t need to. But I knew I was going to act like an owner.”
(Predictably, his manager was pissed.)
Case 1: An actual smart and caring employee bypasses the chain to give me evidence of a manager not acting in the companys interest. Usually that's not the first indication of such a thing and listening around reaffirms the conclusion quickly. The manager is approached as quickly as possible and since at this paygrade it's in no-one's best interest to burn bridges, they suddenly decide to spend more time with their family, a sweet severance package changes hands, employees are happy again and you don't read about this in the news. It's exactly why I said this in the first place (and meant it).
Case 2: An employee with issues not bringing the company further (usually one or more of paranoia, toxicity, not-seeing-the-big-picture, searching for problems instead of solutions or emotional health issues) bypasses the chain of command with "evidence", but listening around almost nobody shares this employees' opinion. You fire them. Suddenly all problems disappear, employees are happy and then you read about this in the news, because the only person left unhappy did really not get the memo.
Judging from the type of problems here (something something starship about floor mats at a time when Model 3 just wasn't ramping up production and cashflow almost ruined the company), I do have my opinion about the type of "privilege escalation" in this case but I obviously won't share it.
I'm mostly playing devils' advocate here, as newspapers, lawyers and shortsellers usually have their own axe to grind and are continually searching for good David against Goliath stories.
Just dropping in that having a toxic effect on the company and being respected / appreciated by peers are absolutely not mutually exclusive. Often times they rather go hand in hand and you've got such people rallying up others over non-issues (in the big picture of things). As others already said in the comments, cohesion and alignment are far more important to a high risk / high growth company than "solving all the problems".
He told me that we have a real-time backup system so he didn't think it was worth fixing. I then asked if we ever ran tests of that system and if we had documentation on how to restore from it. We don't. This is for financial trading application handling billions of dollars. Being down for even a few hours could be catastrophic.
The big man spoke. I don't agree with the outcome, but I'm not the boss. So that was the end of it (except for in discussions like this on here). I left for another team because there's no way I'm going to be the security champion for a system with that level of risk. And thank God you weren't my manager or I would have been fired under your #2 scenario.
On a side note, just because a small number of people are complaining doesn't mean their opinions are invalid. Minorities are often disenfranchised due to this thinking. Also, managers may not know all the policies for the company and may be violating them.
For a real life example combining these, company policy states that a person be evaluated against the standard and recieve a rating that way. Some departments mandate that if a manager pick a higher than average rating for someone, then they must pick someone else to balance it out with a lower rating. This would only affect 10% of the population and the number unjustly affected would be lower than that. So the other 90% recieved good rating, so why would they complain? The objective way I know that I was unjustly rated was because I had a manager friend who told me what happened in the meeting and said it was wrong.
#2 seemed more fitting since no action was taken. And it resulted in me leaving that area of the company (voluntarily thankfully).
I'm sure there's more to the story.
Tesla's PR claims that it's a non-traditional, innovative company, where if someone finds a serious problem that can't be resolved by the chain of command, they should e-mail Musk.
The reality of course, bears little resemblance to the myth.
That's not the only defense, this is example #25360432 showing how necessary labor unions are.
I think arbitration protections and restrictions on employment contracts to preserve employee rights should be handled through legislation since it should be universally applicable to all workers. This would remove the variance in protections from one union to another.
I wonder if the major unions have banned together to get that bill introduced and voted on? It could be possible that they wouldn't support legislation like that because more legislative protections can make the union seem less useful.
If the unions don't have incentive to push the bill and more workers are covered by unions and don't see the benefit of the bill because they are already protected, then could that delay or even prevent the passage of those protections? It may end up as a long term fix that leaves non-uninonized groups and groups that seem unlikely to organize, like IT. Of course with widespread existing adoption, a counter point could be less opposition to it.