Tesla employees' electric dream meets sudden crash in mass layoffs

As Elon Musk announced to cut 10 per cent of Tesla workforce, those who were fired took to social media and professional networking platforms to register their plight after their dream to work at an electric car-maker came to a sudden crash.

The electric car-maker started laying off salaried employees after Musk announced last week to cut the workforce, which would result in reducing Tesla’s total headcount by roughly 3.5 per cent.

Tesla employs more than 100,000 people across its facilities.

In a LinkedIn post, Iain Abshier said that he had “a gut punch” that he would be included in the Tesla layoffs after just two weeks of work.

“Waking up this morning without a 9-5 job for the first time in my adult life, and a weekend full of contemplation, I’ve come to realise that though a career in Recruiting/Talent Acquisition has been fulfilling; it’s not my passion,” he posted.

Another fired Tesla employee Robert Belovodskij wrote that he was notified that the offer he signed to come back to Tesla full-time has been “rescinded due to the current hiring freeze and 10 per cent workforce reduction”.

“This was a crushing blow to me especially because I turned down another full-time offer in order to come back to my team at Tesla,” he posted on LinkedIn.

Electrek reported that despite Musk talking about reducing only the salaried workforce, Tesla “is also laying off hourly workers across its organisation”.

Surprisingly, the layoffs came amid Tesla’s being in the middle of a difficult end-of-quarter delivery wave, even the Gigafactory Shanghai was shut down for a significant part of the quarter due to Covid lockdowns.

“On top of that, Tesla is also pulling employees from its sales and delivery teams across North America to work in service centres,” said the report.

“I’ve talked with 4 software engineers fired in California last week. Every single one of them was let go for performance reasons on the spot. As were hundreds of others that week. Tesla is trying to hide their mass layoffs,” software engineer and tech writer Gergely Orosz posted on Twitter.

A CGI animation lead, who worked at the company for more than six years, posted: “I am saddened to go. I truly did enjoy my job, and I am proud of the work that I’ve produced.”

Christopher Bousigues, Tesla’s Singapore country manager, posted that he’d been laid off as part of the job cuts at Tesla.

Some former employees who were sacked in the ongoing mass layoff have sued Tesla, accusing it of violating federal law in the US.

John Lynch and Daxton Hartsfield, who worked at Tesla’s Gigafactory in Nevada state, said in the lawsuit that they were among “more than 500” Gigafactory employees who were terminated..

According to the lawsuit, the Tesla mass layoff violates the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act.

The act requires employers to notify workers at least 60 days in advance before shutting down a facility or laying off 50 or more workers from the same site.

“Tesla has failed to give Plaintiffs and the Class Members any advance written notice of their terminations,” read the lawsuit.

Musk, however, termed the lawsuit as “trivial”.

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