Tesla sued by ex-employees who claim that mass layoffs violated federal law

engadget.com

67 points·fairytalemtg··53 comments

For those who haven't clicked through to this piece (or the many others running today), we are not just talking about high-paid engineers. Tesla laid off hourly factory workers with only one week notice, citing "performance reasons" despite not having given any performance warning in most cases. Seems to be a pretty flagrant case of disguising layoffs as performance-related firings.

The best part: apparently, to get the one-week "severance," they have to sign releases.

At this point, is anyone really surprised?

I’m not surprised because it’s easy to be such a highly valued company when you’ve cut a hell of a lot of corners!

This is incredible to me. I'd love for someone to articulate what their thought process was to lay off in such a manner.

1. The 1 week severance is a negative incentive to signing anything at all.

2. Providing any reason other than, "thank you for your service" is asking for a lawsuit, especially when the severance is so weak.

What were they actually thinking?

Really not a big deal. Worse case scenario pay them for 60 days. Best case scenario the amount they pay them as severance counts toward the 60 days.

https://webapps.dol.gov/elaws/eta/warn/faqs.asp

Are you sure? That would be quite bad, I am no american, but I think if breaking the law and being caught would put you in the same spot of those not trying the law, it would be quite a incentive in trying to break the law, I think in order to make it fair there should be some penalty? Otherwise why other companies would not try to take the same approach and then just floor courts with this kind of lawsuit?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com