The Tesla Union Drive
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We will see if the workers at Tesla can make any progress on unionizing its Buffalo plant. Incidentally, Buffalo is also where the Starbucks union drive started, so this is both interesting and not surprising that other workers would take courage from that and do their own organizing. That’s how unions work–the more you see it, the more you feel like you can do it too. But Elon Musk being a wretched scumbag of a human being means that Tesla is going to go all in on the union busting, which it is already doing.
In a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, Workers United said Tesla fired more than 30 workers from its Autopilot unit at a Buffalo plant as a retaliatory measure and to discourage union activity. The union urged the NLRB for injunctive relief “to prevent irreparable destruction of employee rights resulting from Tesla’s unlawful conduct.”
Employees at the Buffalo facility on Tuesday launched organizing efforts under the union Tesla Workers United. Workers said they’re seeking a voice in the workplace, along with better pay and job security.
The employees are tasked with labeling videos from the company’s cars in order to improve Tesla’s driver assistance systems, marketed as Autopilot or Full Self Driving.
The typical data annotation job at Tesla involves identifying and describing objects in short clips captured by cameras and sensors on Tesla’s electric vehicles. Data labelers sometimes need to identify overlapping objects, like a wheel in front of a curb or a pedestrian obstructing the full view of a stop sign. They also review crash footage.
Data annotation specialists have their productivity tracked at a granular level. They’re rated on how many clips they can accurately annotate over short periods of time.
Last year, Tesla laid off more than 200 employees who did this type of work in an Autopilot office in San Mateo, California. Hiring these kind of workers in Buffalo helped the company avoid paying a penalty to the state of New York, and to meet a commitment to create high tech jobs there.
Workers received an email Wednesday evening laying out a new policy that prohibits them from recording workplace meetings without the permission of all participants, Tesla Workers United said in a release Thursday. The group said that the policy violates federal labor law and flouts New York’s one-party consent law to record conversations.
Classy guy that Elon Musk. Just what you would expect from a wealthy white South African.