According to the employees, Tesla would have fired about twenty employees at the Buffalo factory in the United States. At issue: his desire to establish a union. But in a blog post, Tesla denies firing them for this reason. Elon Musk’s signature provides context to the story, but confirms that he made these firings.
It’s rare enough for it to stand out, but Tesla has spoken out publicly, via a blog post published on the brand’s website, to respond to ” false accusations “Can we read in the title. Tesla denies having fired 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, at least from their point of view. There we learn that the company evaluates its employees every six monthswith a score of 1 to 5, to allow employees “ calibrate your work with your job expectations“. If the employee is unsuccessful, Tesla specifies that he will be fired.
On December 13, 2022, Tesla adds that an internal communication is sent to managers. This indicates that layoffs of employees who do not meet 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 laid off employees was established on February 3. Tesla clarifies that it was ” long before the announcement of the creation of a union was announced“. He officially intervened on Tuesday, February 14, about “10 days later,” according to the American company. Elon Musk’s firm then defends itself by claiming that’s when 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 charges of spying on employee computers. The company confirms thata monitoring tool is installed on each workstation. This in order, officially,” improve usability of labeling software“. In detail, the tracking tool allows ” calculate the time it takes to tag an image“. The company then deduces that this tool does not prevent employees from going to the bathroom. Which implies here that the number of images analyzed per day is not counted.
Keep in mind that these 675 employees have a seemingly simple but very useful mission for Tesla. Your role is toanalyze images from Tesla cameras around the worldin order to improve the operation of Autopilot, the semi-autonomous driving of the brand’s electric cars.
This is, for example, to confirm whether the car has detected 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 types of details, improving over time. This is what makes Tesla particularly strong against its competitors in autonomous driving.
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