17th April, 2023
Employees at Tesla’s Shanghai factory have taken to social media to appeal to Elon Musk and the Chinese public concerning bonus cuts.
This comes after they were briefed on plans to cut performance bonuses.
Several posts also criticized Tesla’s response to a fatal accident at the company’s world’s largest factory earlier this year, questioning whether the deduction was relevant.
The situation marks a rare outburst of frustration at the Shanghai factory, Tesla’s largest and most productive factory.
Posts have been appearing on forums such as Baidu Tieba since last weekend. Some people took advantage of Twitter, which is also owned by Musk and blocked in China, to tweet the billionaire, his mother Maye Musk, and Tesla accounts.
“Please pay attention to the performance (bonus) of frontline workers at Tesla’s Shanghai factory being arbitrarily deducted,” said a person with the handle @AFeiywu on Twitter in a tweet directed at Elon Musk and Tesla’s Asia unit.
Two workers at the factory said that their boss briefed them over the weekend about a cut in quarterly bonus payments related to the factory’s performance.
They said a Tesla supervisor referred to “safety concerns” when asked why the bonus was cut. Concerned about their jobs, they refused to give their names.
Several online posts allege that workers at a Shanghai factory were unfairly punished in an incident that killed a worker at the factory in February this year.
Reuters