Perhaps by now it has become common knowledge Tesla pay is illegally far below market, work benefits are in dangerous unhealthy decline, and staff are particularly screwed should they dare to invoke basic ethical concerns (e.g. discuss customer or worker safety).
He Died Helping Build Tesla’s Gigafactory. Tesla Didn’t Tell Local Officials.
It’s like reading what a car company would be if Queen Isabella came back from the dead to prove her ruthless deadly Inquisition was a business model.
Torture is so cruel, it is so dehumanizing to both the tortured and the torturer, that it is always wrong, unconditionally. “If torture is evil,” [Ron Gassner] writes, “its efficacy is irrelevant. Those who know it to be evil should reject torture outright, regardless of how efficacious it may or may not be.”
What if Tesla’s work culture is always wrong, unconditionally?
A toxic abuse culture of oppression for profit, as history surely tells us, means we should expect whistleblowers and some big leaks about basic morality failures (e.g. claims about the Queen of Tesla ignoring safety).
The drivers named in the leaks and contacted by the newspaper accused Tesla of brushing off their concerns about its Autopilot technology. It is alleged that employees are given strict guidelines over how to reply to complaints, with some drivers claiming that Tesla workers were urged to avoid written communication to “offer as little attack surface as possible.”
Nobody expects the Tesla Inquisition?
Written communication about customer complaints gives… customers an attack surface?
Customers.
Who is the enemy here?
Perhaps Spain is too obscure a reference. Tesla does burn its customers alive, like in the Inquisition, but we’re talking modern technology.
Did a zombie Nixon come back to become the crazy old man of Tesla?
The files shared with Handlesblatt included details of 2,400 complaints about cars accelerating unexpectedly and 1,500 automatic braking problems – including 139 cases of unintentional emergency braking and 383 “phantom stops”. One customer, who complained about his car “phantom braking”, claimed Tesla showed an “absolute lack of any concern given the seriousness of the security problems”.
That’s like an American citizen saying Nixon had an absolute lack of concern about the seriousness of destroying democracy.
Uh, yeah. Duh.
Allegedly Tesla believes they have perfected a draconian NDA that is so regressive they internally consider it a legal sledgehammer that criminalizes any and all speech they don’t like regardless of safety.
The company said a former employee had “misused his access as a service technician to exfiltrate information in violation of his signed non-disclosure agreement, Tesla’s data management policies…”.
Let me guess, the data management policy says if any data involves customer safety concerns it must not be retained.
It does seem like they learned the exact wrong lessons from Nixon.
“Well, the hell with Dean,” Nixon told Haldeman that Monday morning in the Oval Office. “Frankly, I don’t want to have in the record discussions we’ve had in this room on Watergate.” In another conversation later in the day, the president agreed with Haldeman that they ought to “get rid” of the recordings.
But seriously, while trying to cancel the voice of its customers, Tesla has very sloppily leaked things they probably wish they had deleted.
The files include tables containing more than 100,000 names of former and current employees, including the social security number of Tesla CEO Musk, along with private email addresses, phone numbers, salaries of employees, bank details of customers and secret details from production, Handelsblatt reported. The breach would violate the GDPR, it said. If such a violation was proved, Tesla could be fined up to 4 percent of its annual sales, which could be 3.26 billion euros.
If you ask me how Germany was tricked by Tesla’s CEO to open a clearly horrible and degenerative factory riddled with ethical lapses, I’d say read the related American history.
…manipulative, master politician overseeing every detail: approving a “shakedown”… for donations, fixing the price…, orchestrating “dirty tricks” against opponents, thanking the donor of hush money….
Very modern stuff. Still reminds me of 1470s Spain. I don’t think any German politicians have been burned alive… yet.
The bottom line is there should be an outright ban (e.g. Speak Out Act) on Tesla’s obvious abuse of any NDA in automotive safety disputes.
Tesla has a long history of trying to cover up customer complaints about safety problems. As far back as 2016, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had to announce that customers were allowed to publicize safety issues after reports that Tesla was requiring customers to sign nondisclosure agreements to qualify for warranty repairs on problematic Model S suspensions systems.
That brings forward the question of whether Tesla should also be investigated for suspicious NDA language used to fill its German factory with the “chaos” of easily manipulated and abused foreign workers who have no clue about safety or rights violations.
When Gregor Lesnik left his pregnant girlfriend in Slovenia for a job [far away in another country], his visa application described specialized skills and said he was a supervisor headed to a [completely different] auto plant.
Turns out, that wasn’t true.
The unemployed electrician had no qualifications to oversee… workers and spoke only a sentence or two of [the required foreign language]. He never set foot in [the facility that was written into his papers, a direct competitor to Tesla, to defraud the government]. The companies that arranged his questionable visa instead sent Lesnik to a menial job…. He earned the equivalent of $5 an hour to expand the plant for… Tesla.
Lesnik’s three-month tenure ended a year ago in a serious injury and a lawsuit that has exposed a troubling practice… [of Tesla lying to everyone about everything while censoring others].
That’s just a hint of what could be ahead for any journalist brave enough to interview silenced Tesla factory workers in Germany… as predicted by a 2016 report that didn’t get nearly enough attention.
The part where they report Tesla had lawyers take desperate unskilled Eastern Europeans to apply for visas for work at a BMW factory, and then under strict NDA illegally redirected them into Tesla factory jobs with no qualification or safety… it’s so evil, you can’t make this stuff up.
Think about it. If their NDA-based visa fraud gets investigated, Tesla planted false flags to misdirect authorities for its competitors to get in trouble. That’s a very 1980s South African way of undermining government while wrecking markets too.
Tesla reminds me of when Ford was excitedly pushing politicians to increase production of its cars in Germany using slave labor from Eastern Europe. Who else remembers?
Right Germany?
I mean, right? Extreme right?
Did you Nazi this coming?