Tesla employees at Gigafactory Latest York, situated in Buffalo, say they’re “uninterested in being treated like robots,” and so they informed CEO Elon Musk that they seek to unionize.
It’s not the primary time the automaker has faced unionization efforts, but they’ve mostly been focused at Tesla’s automobile factories, and within the US, specifically at Fremont Factory in California.
The powerful Union of Auto Employees (UAW) has launched through the years several unsuccessful efforts to unionize what’s now the best automobile factory within the US.
CEO Elon Musk has pushed back hard against those efforts, and he was found to have gone too far by the National Labor Relations Board, which ordered Musk to delete a tweet through which he suggested that if Tesla employees unionized they’d lose their stock options.
Regardless, unionization efforts at Tesla factories haven’t gone far through the years.
Now now we have learned of a brand new unionization effort at Tesla, however it’s not at a automobile factory.
Employees at Gigafactory Latest York, where now almost a thousand employees perform data annotation for Tesla’s Autopilot and self-driving efforts, announced their intent to unionize (via Bloomberg):
The staff, who label data for Tesla’s Autopilot technology at the corporate’s plant in Buffalo, Latest York, sent an email to Musk early Tuesday with their intent to unionize. Employees say they’re looking for higher pay and job security alongside a discount in production pressures that they are saying have been harmful to their health.
One in all the fundamental problems appears to be the tracking of employees at work. They claim that Tesla monitors keystrokes and time per task – resulting in employees avoiding things like bathroom breaks so as to not affect their performance.
The Tesla employees are being organized with the assistance of the Service Employees International Union affiliate Employees United, which is thought for having unionized employees at lots of of Starbucks stores.
Al Celli, a member of the union’s organizing committee, said in regards to the Tesla employees at Giga Latest York:
“Individuals are uninterested in being treated like robots.”
Celli added:
“We’ve such a rush to get things done that I don’t know if it’s actually being well thought out. It’s just, ‘Let’s get this out as fast as we will.’”
The info labelers also want higher pay and job security. They’ve a $19-an-hour starting pay.
Tesla has been increasingly trying to automate Autopilot data labeling.
While the organizers are starting with the information labelers, they are saying that they plan to also include about 1,000 manufacturing employees on the factory. Tesla produces Supercharger stations on the factory.