Solar city firings, allegations of discrimination (out of Market Action)

[TheTalkingMule]

This is why Elon essentially scuttled the whole sales operation after the takeover. Salespeople if given the reins will just add cost and commissions until the whole thing becomes too bloated. You're gonna have a handful of dbags who are willing to just fabricate sales to get commissions.

These folks weren't "fired after reporting millions in fake sales", as if they reported something and got fired for it. They were fired along with all the other door-to-door salespeople in an effort to scrap the entire model that led to those fake sales.

Have a super-flat org chart has it's negatives. Again, just having several dozen corporate admins with varying comms/oversight responsibilities might help.

 

[brian45011]

I am a bear and i find it hard to believe they would have pulled a Wells Fargo level fraud like this. I am betting it is just some standard trying to ramp commissions up kind of thing.

Ever hear of SCTY's former Chief Revenue Officer Hayes Barnard?

SolarCity Completes the Acquisition of Paramount Solar | SolarCity

The 1%'s Hand in the Afghan Murders

 

[neroden]

It appears the HR side was investigated. Story has update at end with response from Tesla, included the results of one investigation:
Ex-SolarCity employees: We were fired after reporting millions in fake sales

So, I believe Tesla's response.... but.... it's not fully exculpatory.

Mr. Staples and a coworker were found to have each sent inappropriate text messages to the other. Notably, the photo that Mr. Staples complained about was from a different coworkers’ Facebook public profile, that coworker stated that she had no issue with it, and Mr. Staples similarly told us that at the time it was sent to him, he had no issue with it either. Rather, he raised his concern only after he had a falling out with the coworker who sent it to him, as they previously had been close personal friends. The investigation also revealed that Mr. Staples sent numerous sexually suggestive texts of his own to this same coworker, including partially nude picture of another individual and a sexual video involving another employee. SolarCity provided formal warnings to all involved that this was not acceptable.

Mr. Staples never claimed that his supervisor engaged in sexual orientation harassment of any kind. Claims were made that both Mr. Staples and the supervisor were rude toward one another, but nothing about sexual orientation or the like was ever alleged.

Um. Now we're getting into the sort of word-parsing which I don't think is helpful. Mr. Staples seems to have been as guilty as his coworker, but the entire picture we're getting here means that a hostile environment claim by anyone *else* working in this office seems fully supported. Tesla's lucky that Mr. Beardsley ("I've never worked in an environment this unprofessional") isn't suing.

I firmly believe that Tesla is straightening this stuff out. But....

Their response to Ms. White is frankly weak:

As for your claim of hostility by [redacted], our investigation did not find evidence to support this claim

Which basically doesn't deny that it happened. "We didn't find evidence" is not the same as "We found evidence against".

Good on Tesla for publishing the investigative reports *and* proving that they had reprimanded people and told them to stop the inappropriate sexual communcations.

I have to agree very much that it's good that Tesla liquidated the Direct Sales operation; high-pressure sales operations tend to develop bad corporate culture.