Tesla asking employees to volunteer and deliver cars...

[Barklikeadog]

Tesla is asking employees to volunteer and help deliver 30,000 cars before the end of the quarter
According to an internal email sent on Friday from senior vice president Sanjay Shah to department heads at the company, a copy of which was seen by Business Insider, Tesla again sought employee volunteers from across the company to pitch in and deliver cars before the quarter ends this month.

"We need your help to make more progress in volunteer sign ups," Shah said in the email. "We have to deliver 30,000 more cars in next 15 days."


WTF is this for real? Excuse me, but didn't you lay off your delivery people not too long ago?
Why did you do that if you were about to sell the $35,000 car that you knew had a pent up demand?
Does Tim Cook have any siblings who can come in and plan ahead?

 

[GeoX750]

Well, the good news is they have 30K orders to deliver.

 

[Barklikeadog]

Well, the good news is they have 30K orders to deliver.

Can't complain about that! Why do they put themselves into these 'hell' situations?

 

[jerry33]

Can't complain about that! Why do they put themselves into these 'hell' situations?

Because it gets the most cars delivered in the shortest period of time. Tesla ships overseas cars in the beginning of the quarter and domestic cars at the end. Happens every quarter, only now there are more cars to deliver.

 

[cpa]

I have some personal experience from years' past from a client who permitted its employees to volunteer in furtherance of a company goal:

Word eventually made it to the state payroll taxing authorities and some lawyers. The fines, penalties, interest, workman's compensation insurance, and legal settlement were not cheap. Would have been much cheaper to hire temporary workers from an agency or to bite the bullet and pay overtime to the employees.

Tesla had better do its due diligence on this putative volunteering before permitting it. It could be another disaster lurking in the weeds.

 

[Mod3forMe]

Tesla is asking employees to volunteer and help deliver 30,000 cars before the end of the quarter
According to an internal email sent on Friday from senior vice president Sanjay Shah to department heads at the company, a copy of which was seen by Business Insider, Tesla again sought employee volunteers from across the company to pitch in and deliver cars before the quarter ends this month.

"We need your help to make more progress in volunteer sign ups," Shah said in the email. "We have to deliver 30,000 more cars in next 15 days."


WTF is this for real? Excuse me, but didn't you lay off your delivery people not too long ago?
Why did you do that if you were about to sell the $35,000 car that you knew had a pent up demand?
Does Tim Cook have any siblings who can come in and plan ahead?

I heard Tim Apple is free.

 

[mrdoubleb]

Tesla is asking employees to volunteer and help deliver 30,000 cars before the end of the quarter
According to an internal email sent on Friday from senior vice president Sanjay Shah to department heads at the company, a copy of which was seen by Business Insider, Tesla again sought employee volunteers from across the company to pitch in and deliver cars before the quarter ends this month.

"We need your help to make more progress in volunteer sign ups," Shah said in the email. "We have to deliver 30,000 more cars in next 15 days."


WTF is this for real? Excuse me, but didn't you lay off your delivery people not too long ago?
Why did you do that if you were about to sell the $35,000 car that you knew had a pent up demand?
Does Tim Cook have any siblings who can come in and plan ahead?

Delivery Specialist =! Sales staff

Or is it? Anyone with knowledge of Tesla's in store/service center positions?

 

[jerry33]

Delivery Specialist =! Sales staff

Or is it? Anyone with knowledge of Tesla's in store/service center positions?

A delivery specialist has to know at least some things about the car.

 

[Economite]

"We need your help to make more progress in volunteer sign ups," Shah said in the email.

I wonder what "volunteer" actually means in this context.

Are salaried employees expected to do this in addition to their normal jobs with no additional pay? (that's an awfully coercive practice, especially in a company that just slashed its headcount).

For hourly employees is this treated as overtime at their normal pay rates?

Bad practice all around.

 

[Tam]

...putative volunteering...

Some are salaried workers so I am not sure there are any wage violations.

I think the volunteer part is like instead of staying indoor coding to make sure Autopilot would not smash into Mountain View cement barrier that killed Apple Engineer Walter Huang, the employee can take a break from all those lines of codes and can breathe fresh air by delivering a car.

 

[jerry33]

I wonder what "volunteer" actually means in this context.

Are salaried employees expected to do this in addition to their normal jobs with no additional pay? (that's an awfully coercive practice, especially in a company that just slashed its headcount).

For hourly employees is this treated as overtime at their normal pay rates?

Bad practice all around.

Overtime would be my guess, or perhaps they mean do that instead of your regular job for a few hours. No way to really tell, but not all scenarios are necessarily bad.

 

[Barklikeadog]

Overtime would be my guess, or perhaps they mean do that instead of your regular job for a few hours. No way to really tell, but not all scenarios are necessarily bad.

I can't imagine an 'employee' is delivering a car to a customer's home off the clock. The liability of unpaid 'off the clock' people doing this seems bad bad bad not smart bad.

 

[jerry33]

I can't imagine an 'employee' is delivering a car to a customer's home off the clock. The liability of unpaid 'off the clock' people doing this seems bad bad bad not smart bad.

My assumption was that there were just more people at the delivery centre, not home delivery. I recall that when I received my car there were people complaining that there were forty or fifty miles on the clock (Tesla tested many cars that long at the factory back then). Mine happened to have sixteen. Home delivery could easily put more than fifty miles, unless the car is trailered, and you don't ever want untrained people delivering trailered cars.

 

[cpa]

Some are salaried workers so I am not sure there are any wage violations.

The fact that an employee receives a constant salary of $X per pay period instead of $Y per hour does not bear much weight in deciding whether the salaried employee is "exempt" [from overtime] or non-exempt. There is a lot of case law in this area.

There are a number of factors to determine exempt status:

Ownership of the business
Possession of a license like medicine, law, accounting, engineering
Supervisory and management duties including decision-making, hiring/firing/promoting, and approving of disbursements and invoices
Technical know how of a rare and specialized nature

It is clear that a salaried programmer would be non-exempt. The supervisor of a group of programmers would probably also be non-exempt. The department head of programming could be exempt. Rank-and-file licensed engineers would likely be non-exempt, but the department manager of engineering likely exempt.

There was a class-action lawsuit about 20 years ago where a group of CPAs who worked for one of the Big Six (at the time) firms sued for overtime. The firm's defense was that these employees were licensed accountants who made daily decisions on the audits and other jobs, and therefore exempt. The firm lost at trial and lost at appeal. Possession of a license was not enough to be exempt, as the accountants had no control over hiring/firing, no control over what jobs to work on, and no control over billing/disbursements.

 

[WierdMobile]

That's great for their CPAs, but the programmers can be salaried and exempt, and most non-contractor programming jobs that I'm aware of are. Complaining about being expected to work long hours is a common refrain in the field.

Fact Sheet - Wage and Hour Division (WHD) - U.S. Department of Labor

 

[jerry33]

That's great for their CPAs, but the programmers can be salaried and exempt, and most non-contractor programming jobs that I'm aware of are. Complaining about being expected to work long hours is a common refrain in the field.

Fact Sheet - Wage and Hour Division (WHD) - U.S. Department of Labor

Quite right. IT workers are generally expected to work till the job is done. To get around the laws, there is overtime--but only if it approved. If you're lucky, that might happen once a year.

 

[cpa]

That's great for their CPAs, but the programmers can be salaried and exempt, and most non-contractor programming jobs that I'm aware of are. Complaining about being expected to work long hours is a common refrain in the field.

Fact Sheet - Wage and Hour Division (WHD) - U.S. Department of Labor

That is federal law. State law trumps federal law. I don't know the particulars, but my scrip is on California having much more stringent rules regarding overtime pay in the computer industry than federal law. Maybe as high as close to six figures. For example, California's minimum wage > federal minimum wage. Laws vary from state to state; surely you know this if you are in the computer industry, so please use the appropriate statute or case law as it applies to support your argument.

I have no knowledge of the computer programming industry, so believe your statements about conditions. But I have spent much of my career dealing with labor lawyers and employment law with small to medium businesses who just don't understand or care about the rules.