Giga Berlin is currently accelerating its capacity, however, an anonymous employee has exposed that the factory is at a chaotic phase, where many employees have started entering a goblin mode after less than 6 months of working there due to poor working conditions
The first batch of Tesla Model Y that started delivering in Taiwan this week was imported from Germany, though some owners have discovered disappointing quality from their vehicles that fall below the expectation on German craftsmanship. Perhaps the working environment of Giga Berlin is the source of the problem.
An anonymous employee had sent a letter to the media and exposed on the “completely chaotic” status of Giga Berlin that has happened due to manpower. The following shows an excerpt of the letter:
“Some employees are taking longer sick leaves than their actual working time, while some of my colleagues have yet to come to work for three weeks after working here for less than 6 months. Many more are leaving using sickness an excuse, but the truth is that the working environment is so bad that these employees just don’t have enough incentives to stay here.”
One must understand that Tesla has to accelerate capacity from two giga factories almost at the same time by hiring more than 10K employees at both Giga Berlin and Giga Texas, which is an arduous task for the HR department at any level. According to previous coverage, Giga Berlin currently has 7,500 employees, and is still open for more than 400 positions.
It is evident that German are not all that interested in working at Tesla. Roughly 10% of Giga Berlin’s employees are overseas workers mostly from the nearby Poland, since the factory is only 1 hour drive away from the boarder of Poland.
Compared to Giga Shanghai that was able to ramp up capacity within a short period, Giga Berlin is still trying to increase from a capacity of 2K units of Model Y each week to 5K units, which has yielded significant manpower pressure as mentioned above. A similar situation may also be seen from the US factories, but it is definitely more severe in Europe.
No wonder Musk is a big fan of China, since these tens of thousands of workers who enjoy working overtime are his best backing, and it is almost impossible to replicate the success of Giga Shanghai in both Germany and the US.
The working environment of Tesla may not be the best all this time, but most employees were able to endure the ordeal due to stock dividend, though the acquisition of Twitter that led to a plummet of Tesla’s stock prices has obviously impacted employee benefits.
With that being said, this shouldn’t be a major issue for Tesla, who just needs to adjust manpower, though the particular Model Y that had undergone the assembling of that whistleblower may end up in the Taiwanese market.
It is quite impossible for Giga Berlin to attain a weekly capacity of 5K Model Y this month if it needs to spend more time or cost to handle the issue of manpower, but it has to be done in order to take on additional competitions in 2023.
(Cover photo source: Tesla)
