According to employees, Tesla would have laid off about twenty employees in the Buffalo factory in the United States. At issue: their desire to set up a union. In a blog post, Tesla denies having fired them for this reason. Elon Musk’s firm provides context to the story, but confirms that it made these layoffs.
It’s rare enough to be highlighted, but Tesla has spoken publicly, through a blog post published on the brand’s website, to respond to “false accusations“, can we read in title. Tesla denies having dismissed employees for the sole reason of creating a union, as we announced in our columns last Thursday, February 16.
To prove it, Elon Musk’s firm brings a lot of details to the case, from its point of view at least. We learn there that the company evaluates its employees every six monthswith a score of 1 to 5, to allow employees to “calibrate their work with their job expectations“. If the employee does not succeed, Tesla specifies that he will be dismissed.
On December 13, 2022, Tesla adds that an internal communication is sent to managers. This indicates that layoffs for employees not meeting company expectations will begin the week of February 12, 2023. In Buffalo, about 4% of the Autopilot improvement team was affected. Tesla adds that this team has 675 employees.
The detailed list of dismissed employees was established on February 3. Tesla clarifies that it was “well before the announcement of the creation of a trade union was announced“. This took place, officially, on Tuesday, February 14, approximately “10 days lateras the American company points out. Elon Musk’s firm then defends itself by stating that it was then that the managers knew that one of the 27 people fired was part of this union project.
Tesla spies on employees, for a good cause?
Tesla defends itself against the accusation of spying on employees’ computers. The company confirms thata monitoring tool is installed on each workstation. This in order, officially, “improve the usability of labeling software“. In detail, the monitoring tool makes it possible to “calculate the time it takes to label an image“. The company then deduces that this tool does not prevent employees from going to the toilet. Implying here that the number of images analyzed per day is not counted.
Note that these 675 employees have a seemingly simple but very useful mission for Tesla. Their role is toanalyze images from Tesla cameras around the worldin order to improve the functioning of Autopilot, the semi-autonomous driving of the brand’s electric cars.
This is, for example, to confirm whether the car has spotted a speed limit sign, an animal, a bicycle, etc. Which then improves the neural network, which is an artificial intelligence capable of automatically detecting these kinds of details, improving over time. This is Tesla’s strength in particular against its competitors in autonomous driving.
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