Teslas Shine Dulled By Lawsuit

[tay]

How could the Tesla car company, symbol of forward-thinking, wealth and techie cool have people from Eastern Europe working at their Bay Area factory making $5 an hour?!

That’s right, over a hundred people were brought to Tesla’s Fremont, California plant from places like Slovenia and Croatia to work ten-hour days making $5 an hour,

These guys built a huge new paint shop at the Tesla factory that is rapidly ramping-up production for the Tesla Model 3. (Tesla has already pre-sold over $10 billion worth of these cars!) Oh, and one of the workers almost died, which is why we know about this story. So amidst the wealth of Silicon Valley and high tech bells and whistles, a bunch of guys were effectively making $5 an hour.

Thanks to great reporting by Bay Area News Group’s, Louis Hansen, we also know that Tesla isn’t the only company that got mixed up in sub-contractors that bring in dirt cheap labor from abroad. There are other instances of this happening in Silicon Valley as well as at other car companies.

https://www.patreon.com/markfiore

 

[Angstrom]

To Produce this car at the intended affordable price, tesla needs volume. It's a huge risk, because If they screw this up, They go bankrupt. Very risky times at Tesla. I'm not surprised they are keeping costs as low as possible. Once the cycle is started and steady, It will become low risk, and paying higher wages won't be a problem.

 

[Curious Cdn]

There was a story that I stumbled on last year that is even worse.

Ikea, as you might imagine, tenders out production of their stuff. Fabricators bid on the work. Fair enough.

Before the Iron Curtain fell, there was a fabricator in the GDR (East Germany) that bid so well, do often that they got lots of contracts. It came to light a decade or two later that their labour pool were political prisoners in Gulags who were paid nothing. So quite a bit of Ikea's furniture up to the early nineties was produced by slave labour.

Those progressive Swedes just didn't notice ... dum-de-dum-de-dum.