Tag: Auto Industry

Clueless, Rich, and Narcissistic

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I am referring to Elon Musk, who met with workers and said that he, “Would Allow” them to unionize if he did not personally resolve their issues.

Mr. Musk, you are not the person who makes that decision. Your workers make that decision, period, full stop.

That’s how the system works, no matter how much you want to “disrupt” it.

What’s more, you are not allowed to threaten loss of benefits to employees if they choose to unionize:

In a June 2017 meeting with Tesla employees, CEO Elon Musk solicited their complaints about safety issues and promised to address their concerns, so long as they refrained from trying to organize a union, the National Labor Relations Board alleges.

 The new claims emerged last month as a trial got underway over a complaint filed against Tesla by the NLRB, a government agency tasked with enforcing U.S. labor laws.

 During the June 7, 2017, meeting, Musk allegedly solicited employees complaints about safety issues, and “impliedly promised to remedy their safety complaints if they refrained from their union organizational activity,” the NLRB said.


………

Musk has made his disdain toward the United Auto Workers’ two-year union campaign at Fremont well known, but publicly he’s even gone so far as to call for workers to hold a unionization vote. The NLRB’s latest allegation appears to be the first documented claim of the CEO directly appealing to workers to refrain from organizing activity.  

 ………

 In its filing, the agency said Musk’s statements violated sections 8(a)(1) of the National Labor Relations Act, which says “It shall be an unfair labor practice for an employer to interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees in the exercise of the rights guaranteed” to organize a union.

“For example, employers may not respond to a union organizing drive by threatening, interrogating, or spying on pro-union employees, or by promising benefits if they forget about the union,” according to the NLRB’s website.

And, BTW, he also tweeted that if they voted to unionize, that the would lose their stock options, which is a violation of black letter labor law.

But he’s a Silicon Valley big wig, and laws are for little people.

Here is hoping that the judge will disabuse him of this notion.

Yeah, 80% of the Way to Bond Villain Status

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One of the cave divers involved in the Thai soccer team cave rescue suggested that Elon Musk had no clue what he was talking about.

Elon Musk responded by called the cave diver a pedo:

The Elon Musk story took a bizarre turn Sunday morning, as the world famous entrepreneur took to Twitter to suggest a critic of his submarine rescue plan is a pedophile.

Musk’s tweet was directed at British cave diver Vern Unsworth, who had participated in the rescue of 12 Thai children and their soccer coach from a water-filled cave. In a recent CNN video news report, Unsworth had belittled Musk’s plan to deploy a mini-submarine made by SpaceX engineers to rescue the children.

“He can stick his submarine where it hurts,” Unsworth said when asked about Musk’s plan. “It just has absolutely no chance of working.”

Musk tweeted Sunday that he’ll send a sub through the cave to prove it could have worked, followed by an attack on Unsworth:

“We will make one of the mini-sub/pod going all the way to Cave 5 no problemo. Sorry pedo guy, you really did ask for it.” Musk tweeted.

Seriously, this guy made his fortune by figuring out how to ignore banking laws, and by getting lucky.

The idea that he is a visionary, as opposed to a self-absorbed and conceited ass does not match the facts at hand.

If the above doesn’t make you wonder about Musk, the fact that he is a major donor to a Republican PAC dedicated to preserving their House majority should give you pause:

Now reports indicate that Musk was one of the top donors for a Republican PAC named Protect the House.

Filings show that the Tesla and SpaceX CEO donated $33,900 to the PAC, which is dedicated to keeping Republicans in control of Congress. The PAC raised over $8 million in quarter two, according to filings compiled by ProPublica.

The top donors of the PAC include Sheldon Adelson, the Vegas casino magnate, and Robert McNair, the owner of the NFL’s Houston Texans. Although Adelson and McNair’s contributions far outweighed Musk’s — Adelson and McNair each gave $371,500 respectively, while Musk gave $33,900 — Musk was one of the top 50 donors of the PAC.

Seriously, there is nothing more pathetic than a rich businessman who believes his own PR.

So Not a Surprise

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Language in a confidential severance agreement Tesla Inc. is using as part of the biggest job cut in its history is likely to deter dismissed employees from going public with worker safety concerns, according to employment-law experts.

A proposed severance agreement Tesla presented to one of the more than 3,000 workers dismissed last week required acknowledgment that the employee “had the opportunity to raise any safety concerns, safety complaints, or whistleblower activities against the company, and that if any safety concerns, safety complaints, or whistleblower activities were raised during your employment, they were addressed to your satisfaction.”

The document obtained and reviewed by Bloomberg News also barred the former worker from sharing “business-related” information; required that the ex-employee assist Tesla’s defense against claims; released any claims made against Tesla; and dictated that any disputes under the agreement will be handled in individual arbitration.

“I do think the agreement will chill valid employee complaints,” said Brishen Rogers, a law professor at Temple University. “A reasonable worker would just keep their mouth shut, rather than risk losing their severance pay.”

………

The document, which would provide the employee about two months of severance pay, includes a clause stating that it doesn’t “in any way limit or prohibit” the employee from cooperating with or filing a charge with a government agency. But the rest of the document makes it less likely that fired workers would actually speak up about issues like safety, or be taken seriously if they did, labor law experts say.

“The implication is, if you went to OSHA and you said, ‘Here’s something new I want to tell you about a safety concern at Tesla,’ and then OSHA asks the company to respond to that allegation, the company is going to say, ‘That employee told us that they raised everything,’” said Sharon Block, the executive director of Harvard University’s Labor and Worklife Program.

The language requiring workers to assist Tesla in legal disputes is also potentially problematic, said David Lopez, the incoming co-dean of Rutgers law school.

Elon Musk likes to represent himself as a messianic figure who will change the world.

I want no part of his vision.

Well, this is Profoundly NOT Reassuring

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It appears that the robot Uber than ran down and killed a pedestrian saw the woman, but ignored her, because it had been programmed to.

Basically, Uber’s self-driving software is so crappy and has so many false positives that it was programmed to ignore actual human beings.

Uber is still Uber:

Uber has concluded the likely reason why one of its self-driving cars fatally struck a pedestrian earlier this year, according to tech outlet The Information. The car’s software recognized the victim, Elaine Herzberg, standing in the middle of the road, but decided it didn’t need to react right away, the outlet reported, citing two unnamed people briefed on the matter.

The reason, according to the publication, was how the car’s software was “tuned.” 

Here’s more from The Information:

Like other autonomous vehicle systems, Uber’s software has the ability to ignore “false positives,” or objects in its path that wouldn’t actually be a problem for the vehicle, such as a plastic bag floating over a road. In this case, Uber executives believe the company’s system was tuned so that it reacted less to such objects. But the tuning went too far, and the car didn’t react fast enough, one of these people said.

Let me translate this into English:  Uber put a 4000 pound death machine on the road with software that was incapable of determining the difference between a plastic bag and a human being.

This is not just reprehensible, it might very well be criminal.

Definitely Bond Villain

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We’ve just gotten news that Elon Musk has decided to lock out contractors unless a direct employee of Tesla vouches for them.

This in and of itself, is kind of crappy, but it might be necessary, as a rapid ramp up in contract employees without proper planning can cause a problem.

What takes this into Jeff Bezos (who makes Ernst Stavro Blofeld look like Florence Nightingale) territory is referring to the folks you want to fire as, “Barnicles.”

He’s got to be holding an open call audition for a white Persian cat:

Elon Musk is apparently planning to purge Tesla factories of contractors in the strangest way possible. The company CEO is planning to cut off access to the company to any contractor who doesn’t have a Tesla employee to vouch for the quality of their work.
In a recent email sent to Tesla employees and obtained by Electrek, Musk warned that outside workers will be denied entry into the factory come Monday morning. The only way to keep those extra laborers around is if a Tesla employee is willing to place their own livelihood on the line in order to attest to the contractor’s skills.
Here’s the full email from Musk, via Electrek:

Please note my comment below about contractor companies and consultants. I extended the performance evaluation deadline to provide more opportunity to demonstrate excellence, but now time is up.

Please send a note to HR before Monday justifying the excellence, necessity and trustworthiness by individual (not just the contractor company as a whole) of every non-Tesla person who has badge access to our buildings or network access to our systems.

By default, anyone who does not have a Tesla employee putting their reputation on the line for them will be denied access to our facilities and networks on Monday morning. This applies worldwide.

Time to scrub off the barnacles.

Thanks, Elon

Musk’s habit of referring to contract workers as “barnacles” also came up in the company’s first-quarter earnings call. In addition to throwing a mini-temper tantrum over questions from analysts, Musk also told investors:

The number of third-party contracting companies that we’re using has really gotten out of control, so we’re going to scrub the barnacles on that front. It’s pretty crazy. We’ve got barnacles on barnacles. So there’s going to be a lot of barnacle removal.

Seriously, I’d do up a Downfall rant and upload it to Youtube, but his actual communications are pretty much a Downfall rant in and of themselves.

I don’t shop Amazon or Walmart, and I’m not going to buy a Tesla.

This is some seriously f%$#ed up sh%$.

1 Part Ayn Rand, 1 Part Fredo Corleone

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Tesla Model 3 production isn’t just behind schedule, Tesla Model 3 production has been shut down:

Tesla Inc. is temporarily suspending production of the Model 3 sedan for at least the second time in roughly two months, just after Elon Musk admitted to mistakes that hindered his most important car.

The company informed employees that the pause will last four to five days, Buzzfeed reported. A Tesla spokesman referred back to a statement provided last month, when Bloomberg News first reported that Model 3 production was idled from Feb. 20 to 24. The carmaker said then that it planned periods of downtime at both its vehicle and battery factories to improve automation and address bottlenecks.

The hiatus is another setback for the first model Musk has tried to mass-manufacture. In addition to trying to bring electric vehicles to the mainstream, the chief executive officer had sought to build a competitive advantage over established automakers by installing more robots to quickly produce vehicles. Last week, he acknowledged “excessive” automation at Tesla was a mistake.

It’s more than the lure of automation that has done the damage.

It is the fact that they hold assembly workers in contempt, and this has driven the excessive automation.

Another artifact of this disdain is the fact that it has been concealing assembly line injuries from regulators as well:

Inside Tesla’s electric car factory, giant red robots – some named for X-Men characters – heave car parts in the air, while workers wearing black toil on aluminum car bodies. Forklifts and tuggers zip by on gray-painted floors, differentiated from pedestrian walkways by another shade of gray.

 There’s one color, though, that some of Tesla’s former safety experts wanted to see more of: yellow – the traditional hue of caution used to mark hazards.

 Concerned about bone-crunching collisions and the lack of clearly marked pedestrian lanes at the Fremont, California, plant, the general assembly line’s then-lead safety professional went to her boss, who she said told her, “Elon does not like the color yellow.”

 ………

 What she and some of her colleagues found, they said, was a chaotic factory floor where style and speed trumped safety. Musk’s name often was invoked to justify shortcuts and shoot down concerns, they said.

Under fire for mounting injuries, Tesla recently touted a sharp drop in its injury rate for 2017, which it says came down to meet the auto industry average of about 6.2 injuries per 100 workers.

But things are not always as they seem at Tesla. An investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting found that Tesla has failed to report some of its serious injuries on legally mandated reports, making the company’s injury numbers look better than they actually are.

 ………

 Instead, company officials labeled the injuries personal medical issues or minor incidents requiring only first aid, according to internal company records obtained by Reveal.

 Undercounting injuries is one symptom of a more fundamental problem at Tesla: The company has put its manufacturing of electric cars above safety concerns, according to five former members of its environment, health and safety team who left the company last year. That, they said, has put workers unnecessarily in harm’s way.

Tesla may be the future of electric cars, but it it is, it means that the future of electric cars sounds a lot like Walmart.

And Elon Musk is Overrated

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After years of production problems resulting from automation issues that have been documented by legacy automobile manufacturers, Elon Musk has finally admitted that over-reliance robots and automation was a mistake, and has noted that “Humans are underrated“.

This is what happens when someone thinks that they are smart enough to ignore lessons leaned over decades from auto manufacturing across the world:

In a rare mea culpa for the mercurial billionaire, Tesla CEO Elon Musk acknowledged that the company has been too reliant on robots for production.

Yes, excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake. To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 13, 2018

“Excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake,” Musk wrote, responding to a Wall Street Journal reporter’s tweet. “Humans are underrated.” He also talked about this with CBS News’ Gayle King, adding “we had this crazy, complex network of conveyor belts….And it was not working, so we got rid of that whole thing.”

You know, if humans are underrated, and you admit to over-automating your assembly line.

If you have REALLY have learned your lesson, how ending your policy of treating your assembly line workers like complete sh%$?

Is Tesla Having Its Uber Moment?

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The Bernstein report on $TSLA ‘s manufacturing strategy was the best sell side thing I have read in a long time.

— Donut Shorts (@DonutShorts) March 29, 2018

This Twitter stream is a good primer

People are beginning to notice that Tesla has problems, and that many of them are symptomatic of the dot-com ethos of its founder, Elon Musk.

The most classic example is that of their manufacturing problems, where they are seeing both quality and productions problems, and now an analysis of Tesla’s production plans show that both are a function of its single minded insistence on eliminating the human component:

The robots are killing Tesla.

In a rare win for humans over robots in the battle for labor efficiency, Wall Street analysts have laid down a compelling argument that over-automation is to blame for problems at the billionaire Elon Musk’s electric-car company.

That is to say, the very innovation and competitive advantage that Musk says he’s bringing to the car industry — his nearly fully automated plant in Fremont, California — is the reason Tesla is unable to scale quickly.

According to the Bernstein analysts Max Warburton and Toni Sacconaghi, it’s the robots that can’t pump out Tesla’s highly anticipated Model 3s fast enough. The whole process is too ambitious, risky, and complicated.

From Bernstein (emphasis ours):

“Tesla has tried to hyper-automate final assembly. We believe Tesla has been too ambitious with automation on the Model 3 line. Few have seen it (the plant is off-limits at present), but we know this: Tesla has spent c.2x what a traditional OEM spends per unit on capacity.

“It has ordered huge numbers of Kuka robots. It has not only automated stamping, paint and welding (as most other OEMs do) — it has also tried to automate final assembly (putting parts into the car). It talks of two-level final lines with robots automating parts sequencing. This is where Tesla seems to be facing problems (as well as in welding & battery pack assembly).”

………

 Bernstein adds that the world’s best carmakers, the Japanese, try to limit automation because it “is expensive and is statistically inversely correlated to quality.” Their approach is to get the process right first, then bring in the robots — the opposite of Musk’s.

 It’s not a problem that Tesla, a highly indebted company, can afford forever.

 ………

 So in Musk’s attempt to bring on the robot uprising that will revolutionize how we make cars, he’s burned cash and baked in his own mistakes. If you think about it that way, we are just beginning to understand how much this will cost him.

The dotcom ethos is ship it then fix it, and that if you have a problem, you can always throw a few more servers and few more programmers at this.

So, Tesla has been trying to do something that the auto industry has been trying, and failing, to do for years, and its solution is to throw more hardware at it without addressing the underlying problem.

Very dotcom, and it’s why they continue down their dysfunctional path, because this is how it is done in IT.  (Also why every few months you hear of a data breach)

Here is a money quote from the report, courtesy of Naked Capitalism:

[A]utomation is expensive — and usually proves far less effective, highly inflexible, and creates quality problems further down the line.

  • In welding, mistakes and inconsistences go unrecognized — but the machine powers on and builds cars with the wrong geometry or bad spot welds in key locations. These are only found later — when for instance the windscreen is inserted, or a door re-attached. Have you wondered why Tesla doors don’t align, or hoods don’t fit, or windscreens are prone to cracking? Now you have your answer.
  • In final assembly, robots can apply torque consistently — but they don’t detect and account for threads that aren’t straight, bolts that don’t quite fit, fasteners that don’t align, or seals that have a defect. Humans are really good at this. Have you wondered why Teslas have wind noise problems, squeaks and rattles, and bits of trim that fall off? Now you have your answer.

This is a state of affairs that has the New York Times wondering about its continued viability, and Bloomberg has noted that Tesla bonds are tanking.

Software can facilitate some aspects of operating in the real world, but when the primary activity is operating in the real world, it cannot change reality.

Overselling and under-delivering is a feature, not a bug.

Applying Software Ethos to the Real Word

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I am referring, of course to Elon Musk and Tesla Motors.

The author draws analogies to the bad old days of the US auto industry, where shipping was more important than shipping it right:

The idea that Silicon Valley could reinvent the auto sector the way Apple reinvented mobile phones is an appealing one, and by some metrics Tesla has done just that. The Silicon Valley automaker’s distinctive product features — blistering performance, long-range batteries and slick touchscreen interfaces –have beguiled legions of fans and investors, giving the impression that the future of the auto industry had suddenly arrived.

But recent reports call that glowing future into question. After 15 years, it’s increasingly clear that Tesla has nothing to offer in the area that, as the tech analyst Horace Dediu puts it, is where “almost all meaningful innovation occurs”: the production system.

Throughout its history, Tesla has been plagued by poor manufacturing quality and missed production deadlines. And now, CNBC’s Lora Kolodny has the scoop on Tesla operations tasked with “reworking” and “remanufacturing” poor quality cars and parts, illustrating a deeper problem than the poor quality itself. By reworking vehicles after they come off the line at its Fremont, California, assembly plant at a dedicated remanufacturing facility in nearby Lathrop — and even reportedly in its service centers — Tesla is taking automotive manufacturing back to dark ages.

Once upon a time, this was the standard practice for Detroit’s automakers. Driven by logic derived from Henry Ford’s manufacturing system, U.S. automakers kept production cranking in order to maximize efficiencies of scale, and then repaired defective cars after they rolled off the line. Though many factors contributed to the decline of the Big Three in the 1970s and 80s, the inefficiency and apathy entrenched in company culture by this approach to quality was one of the most important.

In contrast, Toyota’s cars may not have had the dramatic, chrome-draped designs or V8 performance of American competitors, but the legendary Toyota Production System (also known as TPS, or “lean”) did away with rework, and its dependable, high-quality cars eviscerated Detroit’s market share. By systematically eliminating all forms of waste — “muda” — from its manufacturing, Toyota found that both capital efficiency and quality benefited enormously from building cars right the first time.

………

Tesla seems either uninterested in or oblivious to the historical lesson here. On last quarter’s earnings call, chief executive Elon Musk told analysts that Tesla doesn’t see TPS as a model for his company, even as he reiterated his goal of “productizing” Tesla’s factories.

Manufacturers have learned that it’s better to get it right the first time over the past few decades, computer programmers, not so much.

Hence we see the bloated software that is as full of bugs as it is full of new features that no one really needs.

Rinse, lather, and repeat, and we have Elon Musk’s Tesla.

Elon Musk Naked

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No, no pictures, I am referring to the fact that the emperor may have no clothes, and Elon Musk, in particular his Tesla Motors project, seems to be increasingly unmoored from reality:

If you’re a hedge fund analyst looking over a public company’s numbers and you see a troubling financial trend making itself evident in the data (like a company burning through cash while booking revenue for a product that is seems perhaps incapable of delivering in the volume promised in the timeframe laid out), you will feel the natural urge to short that company’s stock and wait quietly for the money and praise to roll in.

But we want you to pause for a moment and look at the top of that file. Does it say “Tesla Motors, Inc. (TSLA)”?

It does?

Yeah, you’re going to want to rethink that short, homie, because you have not factored “Blind Elon-ic Faith” into your Alpha.

But you wouldn’t be alone.

Tesla reported yesterday, and from a purely logical perspective it was a mixed bag:

Tesla’s reported a net loss of $336 million, or $2.04 per share, compared to a loss of $293 million, or $2.09 a share, a year ago.

 Excluding stock based compensation, Tesla lost $1.33 a share, which was narrower than expected, according to a consensus estimate from Thomson Reuters.

 Revenue climbed to $2.79 billion from $1.27 billion in the year-ago period, and outpacing Wall Street’s estimates of $2.51 billion.

Yeah, we said “mixed”:

Heading into the earnings report, analysts expressed concerns about whether Tesla would ramp up production of its Model 3, a more affordable electric car with a base cost of $35,000, quick enough. In the past, Tesla has struggled with production issues.

Musk also said that he hasn’t ruled out dipping a toe back into the debt market.

See, Tesla is currently promising that it can make 1,500 of these things in the entire third quarter of this year, but Elon is also telling anyone who will listen that he will be able to make 10,000 in a week by the end of 2018. That kind of ramp-up has led a lot of people in the asset management game to doubt Tesla’s long-term strength, what with logic dictating that cash will burn at the altar of Elon’s ambition, and that the fire might rage out of control while he’s busy glancing over at his rockets, his Hyperloop tunnels or putting the finishing touches on his dope-ass new solar roof. All those factors are causing David Einhorn and a legion of his fellow traders to go short on TSLA.

Just to remind you, their plant used to be the joint Toyota-GM NUMMI plant, and the most cars that it ever produced under that management was 428,633 units in 2006, or less than 8,500 units a week, and Tesla is saying that it can ramp up from about 120 units a week to 10,000 units a week over the next 18 months.

For his next trick, Elon Musk will appoint a horse to his board of directors.

But the underlying story here is that Tesla releases profoundly mixed numbers, reveals that its production ramp up plans are unrealistic, and they get shorted by speculators.

In response to an awful quarterly report, the stock goes up, and the speculators take it on the chin, because ……… Elon!

This is what happens when you short a cult. At this point, R Kelly has nothing on Elon Musk. And the notion that a short squeeze might put a shudder in Tesla’s rise seems – like all other rational ideas that come in contact with Tesla – to be neutered by whatever Tesla investors think of Tesla.

 So, here’s our last word of caution to you hedgie analysts out there crunching numbers on TSLA: You’re wasting your time. Tesla isn’t about facts and figures, it’s about belief in the divinity of Elon f%$#ing Musk. You’ll never understand what is happening because the Kool-Aid is the stock and a lot of people can’t stop drinking it.

(%$# mine)

So, Tesla is facing a unionization effort from employees who say that their manufacturing facility is abusive and dangerous, and the corporate response has been (I am not kidding here) free frozen yogurt at their Freemont, CA plant.

So now Tesla is warning its workforce, one that already has issues with excessive mandatory overtime ans safety issues that they will be facing, “Production Hell“.

Honestly, I’m half expecting a strike in the next 18 months:

When Tesla chief executive Elon Musk handed over the first 30 Model 3 sedans to reservation holders last Friday, he warned employees they’ll be in “production hell” for the next several months. It was a curious remark, as Tesla employees have been voicing concerns about workplace injuries since earlier this year. Employees reiterated those points in a letter to Tesla’s board Monday, and demanded answers to questions about pay transparency and safety.

“We’re tired of suffering preventable injury after preventable injury,” said Michael Catura, a production associate at Tesla, in a statement. “It impacts morale, it slows down production and it’s of course traumatizing and financially difficult for the affected person. We want to know what the company’s plan is to address this problem, and to see whether or not any progress is being made.”

The letter, signed by the Tesla Workers’ Organizing Committee, said it believes in Tesla’s mission to build a mass-market, emission-free electric vehicle. But the committee cites a number of ongoing issues, and it requests access to a safety plan and clarity on pay and non-retaliation agreements for employees trying to form a union. Earlier this month, a group of 10 factory employees presented a petition with questions about how workers are paid and how raises are distributed. BuzzFeed reported that about 400 employees had signed the petition.

So not a Surprise

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Tesla is facing a unionization effort from employees who say that their manufacturing facility is abusive and dangerous:

Along Silicon Valley’s interlocking freeways, low-slung tech offices with obscure names like Way.com or Oorja are populated by fresh-faced technologists in badges and pleated slacks, striving to create the next great app. But off the I-880 in Fremont, a white colossus rises from the landscape, a 5.3-million-square-foot monster that stretches across two interchanges. The gray lettering is a full story high: TESLA.

Here, the company makes high-end, zero-emission vehicles, luxury cruisers for a climate emergency. Chief executive officer Elon Musk has cultivated a reputation as an economic visionary and has been hailed for solving the world’s great challenges with panache. Tesla’s Fremont factory brought hope to a blue-collar, racially diverse town with a manufacturing tradition. And this week, after reports of a 69 percent increase in first-quarter sales, the automaker passed Ford in market value. But though its products epitomize the future, workers like Richard Ortiz say Tesla’s labor conditions are mired in the past. Ortiz is a production associate in the closures department, assembling hoods, doors—“anything that opens or closes”—on Model S sedans and Model X SUVs. Though videos of the Tesla factory emphasize robotic automation, over 6,000 workers engage in intense manual labor to build the cars.

“I have an eight-pound rivnut gun,” Ortiz said, referring to a tool that installs rivet nuts. “I’m doing that all day long. I’m to the point where, if I pick something up with any weight, within 30 seconds I have to drop it. That scares me; I want to be able to use my arm when I retire.”

Tesla workers say circumstances like Ortiz’s are commonplace at a factory that prioritizes production goals over health and safety. Now they’re fighting back against low pay, hazardous conditions, and a culture of intimidation, seeking to unionize through the United Auto Workers. Tesla is the only U.S. automaker using nonunion workers at a stateside plant, and breaking through would give organized labor a foothold in the tech industry as well. Until then, the Tesla experience reveals that green jobs aren’t necessarily good jobs without worker power. “They want to make sustainable cars,” says Ortiz. “We need sustainable employment.”

………


But after originally describing Tesla as “union neutral,” Musk said on an earnings call in February that “there are really only disadvantages to someone to want the UAW here.” In a later email to workers, Musk delivered a point-by-point rebuttal to Moran’s Medium post, arguing that overtime had decreased and incident rates were below average. Instead of offering workers better wages and input on production, Musk promised “a really amazing party” for the launch of the Model 3, “free frozen yogurt stands” at the factory, and “a Tesla electric pod roller coaster” connecting the parking lots. “It’s going to get crazy good,” Musk concluded.

………

Labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein expressed horror at Musk’s rhetoric. “It was the worst kind of caricature of a capitalist, like it’s 1898,” he said. “They have these sophisticated systems of production and distribution, but their social arrangements are utterly retrograde.”

Mr. Lichtenstein may not know it, but his categorization of Musk’s rhetoric can be more broadly applied to the tech industry.

Until the drones at places like Tesla, Facebook, Uber, and Google come to understand that providing free frozen yogurt is not a sign of respect from their employers, but rather an indicator that management thinks that the employees are easily manipulated rubes, this situation will not improve.

The autoworkers are sharper than the Stanford educated programmers when they say about this attidude is that, “It’s insulting, it shows you what he thinks of us.”