Claims Of Sabotage, A Lawsuit And Workplace Safety Concerns – Just What Is Going On With Tesla?
MODEL 3 BEHAVIOR
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Last Sunday night, in response to yet another fire in Tesla's Fremont, CA factory, CEO Elon Musk sent an email to employees. In his company-wide memo, Musk accused an employee of "quite extensive and damaging sabotage to our operations." While Musk pegged the employee's motived to a denied promotion, he then went on to connect the alleged transgressions to something far more sinister. 

"As you know, there are a long list of organizations that want Tesla to die. These include Wall Street short-sellers, who have already lost billions of dollars and stand to lose a lot more," Musk wrote in an email obtained by CNBC. "Then there are the oil & gas companies, the wealthiest industry in the world — they don't love the idea of Tesla advancing the progress of solar power & electric cars."

On Wednesday, Tesla filed a lawsuit against the employee, Martin Tripp, claiming that he stole company secrets and made false claims to reporters. Then, just a few hours later, Tesla claimed that a friend of Tripp had contacted them, warning them that Tripp had reportedly said he was going to go to Tesla's Nevada-based Gigafactory to "shoot the place up." Tripp denied these claims to the Washington Post, and a subsequent investigation by the local Sheriff's department found "no credible threat."

In an interview with CNN, Tripp claimed whistleblower status, denying accusations that he had hacked Tesla systems, claiming he wanted to expose unsafe conditions within the Model 3 production. "I didn't hack into system," he told CNN. "The data I was collecting was so severe, I had to go to the media."

As Musk frames it, that the automotive and oil industries would conspire to install a saboteur amongst Tesla's ranks makes sense, since the company is a at very crucial moment as they attempt to ramp up stalling Model 3 production to 5,000 cars per week. So what does that make Tripp? Disgruntled employee? Corporate mole? Whistleblower? 

New details will, hopefully, come to light as the lawsuit heads to court, but this week's developments are far from the first hiccups the electric carmaker has seen in the past.

In February of last year, Tesla employee Jose Moran wrote a blog post that gave an inside look into the harsh working conditions of Tesla Fremont factory, and also revealed that employees were also talking to representatives of the United Auto Workers union — something that Musk has publicly come out against and potentially violated labor laws in his public critcism of his employees' organizing efforts.

Following up Moran's public statements on poor working conditions, The Center for Investigative Reporting's Reveal published a lengthy investigation into lax workplace safety measures in Tesla's Fremont factory — citing underreported injuries, management that would ignore safety concerns, and Musk's own personal design preferences taking precedence over industry-standard factory safety measures.

Tesla, worth about $50 billion, employs more than 10,000 workers at its Fremont factory. Alongside the company's remarkable rise, workers have been sliced by machinery, crushed by forklifts, burned in electrical explosions and sprayed with molten metal. Tesla recorded 722 injuries last year, about two a day. The rate of serious injuries, requiring time off or a work restriction, was 30 percent worse than the previous year's industry average.

[Reveal]

In typical Tesla fashion, the company responded to the Reveal story with its own blog post, refuting the outlet's reporting and even going so far as to call the publication "an extremist organization working directly with union supporters to create a calculated disinformation campaign against Tesla." Three days after the Reveal story, the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration opened an investigation into the Fremont plant.

In May, the Guardian published their own investigation into Tesla's Fremont factory working conditions, backing up Reveal's reporting that management ignored regular safety concerns voiced by employees. However, this time around, Musk took a more sympathetic position to his workers.

In a phone interview about the conditions at the factory, which employs about 10,000 workers, the Tesla CEO conceded his workers had been "having a hard time, working long hours, and on hard jobs", but said he cared deeply about their health and wellbeing. His company says its factory safety record has significantly improved over the last year.

[The Guardian]

In what seemed like a turning point for the company, a month later turned sour as a follow-up report by the Guardian published last week found that efforts to increase safety within the factory, and even a promise by Musk to personally meet with every injured employees were nothing more than lip service.

Whether Musk ever intended to follow through on his word to meet "every injured person" is an open question. But in conversations with more than 10 current and former Tesla employees over the past month, workers described the consequences of having a boss whose bombastic promises – to shareholders, to customers and to them – frequently go unfulfilled. While the billionaire's loose tongue and overly optimistic pronouncements may still excite his legions of fans and customers, many factory workers feel that they have become collateral damage.

Of the workers who spoke to the Guardian for this article, six had been injured at work. None of them ever heard directly from Musk or had him perform their task on the assembly line.

[The Guardian]

The same week that the Guardian published it's follow-up report, Tesla announced a 9% cut to staff. In the weeks and months leading up to Tesla's current row with Tripp, the company, according to Bloomberg's Model 3 tracker, has yet to hit the goal of 5,000 cars produced per week. 

<p>Steve Rousseau is the Features Editor at Digg.&nbsp;</p>

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