9 ms·

Tesla's entire marketing message is about how they are saving the planet. It's really ironic then how many times I've heard about the terrible working condition

• eridius 10y ago
  I don't agree with this. I think the two are completely orthogonal. Your argument hinges on the assumption that saving the planet is strictly for the benefit of the humans living on the planet, and that seems wildly arrogant.
  • mhermher 10y ago
    Then who or what is it for? Who cares about the earth if humans don't benefit? It's just a floating rock.
    • eridius 10y ago
      How about all the rest of the incredible amount of life that we share this floating rock with?
      • strgrd 10y ago
        Well, for starters, more than half of that "life" doesn't even have thumbs, so even if that life were sentient beyond eat/fuck/kill, it couldn't pick up rocks or anything. I would say the majority of "life" on this planet is dumpster life, evolutionary mishaps that haven't yet been culled. There are more interesting animals out there, elephants, dolphins, etc., but again, thumbs.
        • chillwaves 10y ago
          It's incredible to me how dismissive you are of life itself given what an incredibly, unfathomably tiny percentage of matter can be classified as alive.
        • deleted 10y ago
          [deleted]
      • tabeth 10y ago
        I agree, but most people couldn't care less about that. Most people eat meat, use housing that's displaced huge amounts of land that animals use to inhabit, etc.
      • guard-of-terra 10y ago
        Is it still on that floating rock when there's nobody to see it? "If a tree falls in a forest"
    • lutusp 10y ago
      > Then who or what is it for? Who cares about the earth if humans don't benefit? It's just a floating rock. This is not directed at you personally, but the view that humans are all that matters is a kind of species narcissism. In fact, we derive all sorts of benefits from other species, such that if all of them were to disappear, so would we.
      • mhermher 10y ago
        Yes. I mean I am totally a species narcissist I admit. We gain a ton of benefits from other animals, obviously. But if we don't exist, then those animals no longer matter. We wouldn't benefit from them anymore. Anyway, this is getting a bit in the weeds.
  • lazaroclapp 10y ago
    Sure, except that by that metric, Tesla is a wildly inefficient venture. If your objective function is to reduce global warming, without any care about collateral damage to human quality of life, then a bioweapons company is a better choice than an electric cars one. So we have to assume that the objective function for Elon is a bit more complex than that.
• tn13 10y ago
  Makes no sense to me. Are you saying a doctor who smokes is not a good doctor ? American workers should realize that they are competing with Chinese workers who will give life and limb to work in the environment that Tesla is providing them. They should either compete or let the Chinese do the work for 1/10th of the cost instead of whining about not getting diet soda in vending machines.
  • pkkim 10y ago
    And the Chinese worker should feel lucky his job isn't shipped to Vietnam!... And the Vietnamese worker should feel lucky his job isn't shipped to Bangladesh!... And the Bangladeshi adult worker should feel lucky his job isn't given to Bangladeshi 9-year-olds!... Seriously, you are right that if wages go too high and it's convenient for the company, they will take production elsewhere. That's not an argument for workers shutting up and taking scraps; it's an argument for a global minimum wage.
    • tn13 10y ago
      Global minimum wage ? You are probably smoking some hard leftist hippie weed. Of course labor should move to places where people will be happy to take it and thank the employer. Unionisation kills jobs. I can totally see Musk having plan B to move the entire factory to Mexico sooner or later.
    • ryao 10y ago
      Or employ robots.
  • AlexandrB 10y ago
    > American workers should realize that they are competing with Chinese workers who will give life and limb to work in the environment that Tesla is providing them. They are realizing this - which is why they elected Donald Trump and his protectionist rhetoric. > They should either compete or let the Chinese do the work for 1/10th of the cost instead of whining about not getting diet soda in vending machines. "Let them eat cake."
  • chillwaves 10y ago
• HeavenBanned 10y ago
  I think all public corporations should _require_ worker democracy. Democracy of our government naturally extends (with no logical inconsistency) to the publically-owned workplace. Unionization is more than a human right. A lot of negativity in here about "getting vending machine options"...how do you think we got the Weekend? By bowing down to slave-efficiency abroad? No. We need to be better than that. All publically traded companies should be unionized mandatorily. Think of it this way: should not a dictatorship be scrapped for a democracy immediately if one can do so? In this same sense, unionization is much more favorable than de facto feudalism. And our current system is feudalism with makeup. Make no mistake about that. Forget about competing with China. We can raise the standard of living here for our workers. Union bosses have a seat at the board room table in Germany, why can't we do that here? Unionization (democracy in the workplace) is not just a right, it's an essential need. And it stems from the capitalistic fallacy: "You (the worker/producer) do not control the wages." And it shows in the devastatingly large surplus value that's caused crash after crash and recession after depression and the crippling wealth gap between rich and poor.
  • hutzlibu 10y ago
    "Union bosses have a seat at the board room table in Germany" From what I heard, they are sitting so often together at the "board room table", that you can't really seperate them from the ordinary bosses ...
    • HeavenBanned 10y ago
      I would say their negotiations [1] have been fruitful. A 4.8% increase is pretty good. Contrast that with scare tactics and an absence of a union at Tesla. I'll take VW's model any day of the week. [1](http://www.marketwatch.com/story/volkswagen-strikes-deal-on-wages-with-german-union-2016-05-20 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/volkswagen-strikes-deal-on-...)
  • theandrewbailey 10y ago
    > All publically traded companies should be unionized mandatorily. I'm not against unions, but I think mandating them is a bad idea. Smells like a recipe for disaster. What if everyone's totally OK with their workplace? Government would be requiring an external (perhaps redundant) bureaucracy (with all its waste and inefficiency), supported from a cut of everyone's paycheck, regardless of whether people wanted it or not.
• mikeash 10y ago
  It would be sensible to sacrifice the well-being of a small group in order to save the whole, if it's necessary to do so. I don't think your inference makes any sense. Poor working conditions for one factory and saving the planet as a whole are different concerns. That said, I would certainly like to see them improve in this area. I'm a big fan of Tesla, but they are not without their flaws, and working conditions appear to be one of them. They should do better. Not because it somehow conflicts with their mission, but just because it's the right thing to do.
  • yarou 10y ago
    > Poor working conditions for one factory and saving the planet as a whole are different concerns. I think that's contradictory. If you are setting out to save the world, but you can't improve factory conditions for your own workers, how have you shown the capability to save the world? I'm reminded of having a strong AI agent that's given the condition "save humanity". That condition can be satisfied by having no humans on the planet to save.
    • Dylan16807 10y ago
      >how have you shown the capability It's irrelevant. Nothing you do for worker satisfaction in one factory demonstrates whether you can or cannot save the world. There is absolutely no contradiction in treating them separately. This doesn't excuse making workers unhappy, but it's really a separate issue.
    • mikeash 10y ago
      Let me consider the opposite question: if you are setting out to save the world, and you can improve factory conditions for your own workers, how have you shown the capability to save the world? It's just not relevant. It's a non sequitur. It's "A is bad, B is good, you're doing A, therefore you can't do B."
    • cderwin 10y ago
      It is most certainly not contradictory. For example, one could make the argument that the allied effort against the Nazis in WWII was tantamount to "saving the world", yet the allied forces certainly didn't treat everyone in the most humane way possible -- see Japanese internment in the US, or the presumable "war crimes" that Allied forces committed in WWII. Yet that doesn't mean Allied forces weren't capable of destroying the Axis, which obviously is what happened. A similar argument could be made about the Cold War and McCarthyism. It is simply nonsensical to mistake the goal of "saving the world" with the goal of "don't ever treat anyone slightly questionably ever again".
• kbenson 10y ago
  It's all about where you put the horizon in your short-term thinking. It's sort of like refusing to have your army defend against an invasion because some of your soldiers may die, when you're pretty sure the invaders are going to kill more people than that anyway if not stopped. If Tesla's management really believes they are changing the world and having a non-negligible impact, then they might easily justify to themselves that while they aren't the most benevolent of employers, they make up for it with what they do. The problem is that a) people may not even agree their goal is beneficial, or b) accepting the prior as true may not agree the degree to which their actions are beneficial in the end, or c) accepting both the prior as true may not care because those actions may disproportionately affect the person in question. In any case, I don't think it's as simple as you make it out to be.
• trome 10y ago
  Yeah, Tesla is here to make money above all else, and they're gonna do as much time theft as they can, likely putting Amazon, Walmart & McDonalds to shame. Shit must be real bad over there if they are attempting to unionize, if you notice the only places that still have a union in the US in spite of union busting are where the employer has made it an absolute living nightmare to work, hence the union to back the workers up.
  • foota 10y ago
    Yes, public schools are just awful /s
    • trome 10y ago
      You gotta educate 30+ children (some with special needs who likely aren't getting the assistance they are legally entitled to), the school administration, testing & overview policies (which treat teachers as totally incompetent here in the US) and deal with the kids parents to top it off. Each of those factors alone can make for a bad work environment, combined it is a living nightmare. Plus the pay is very low, so its not as though you are able to afford much.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  • kevinnk 10y ago
    Few people who would describe working as a teacher, an airline pilot, or a professional athlete as a "living nightmare".
    • trome 10y ago
      Sure, few people may describe those jobs as a living nightmare, but most people have no first hand experience at working any of those jobs. I'd never want to do any of those jobs, all three of them have positively awful working conditions, with the last usually resulting in lifelong mental damage from repeated jarring of the head (in addition to injuries), and most school districts & airlines push their teachers and pilots to the edge of the law, whether it be student load (and putting special needs students in classes with overloaded teachers illegally), or leaning on pilots to fly with the absolute minimum fuel they can get by with, despite regulations.
• mixmastamyk 10y ago
  A friend working over at spacex told me of the horrors there as well. Despite the love he gets here, Musk appears to be one of those nightmare bosses from the bad old days, the type that has not heard about peopleware and would scoff if he did.
• danielahn 10y ago
  Do you have any 'good' sources on other complaints about working conditions? Honest question, quick google search gives me a number of results but nothing that seems to have meaningful follow-up of any sort.
  • xiphias 10y ago
    I thought of applying to Tesla as a software engineer, but after reading through Glassdoor reviews, I decided it's not worth to destroy my life, even if it's an amazing company in what it will hopefully achieve (and not so amazing in how it treats workers)