Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

According to news on December 6, when Elon Musk (Elon Musk) pushed for extra-large layoffs in November, Tesla faced the problem of global manpower shortage. Tesla's job openings have doubled since mid-June, and his Berlin superfactory has yet to recruit enough staff.

Tesla's Berlin plant opened in March, when Mr Musk announced his goal of producing 5000 cars a week by the end of the year. However, after experiencing major recruitment problems, Tesla is far from achieving this goal. Tesla had planned to recruit 12000 people in Germany, but so far only 7000 have been recruited.

Tesla is not only difficult to recruit, but even his ability to retain employees is declining, with experienced employees constantly losing, according to departing and serving employees at the factory. In the highly competitive German manufacturing sector, Tesla is leaving in large numbers, including temporary and full-time employees, because of low wages and inequality and lack of management experience, they say.

A working employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job said Tesla's Berlin factory was "a mess". "some people call in sick longer than they actually work," he said. in the past six months, several people have worked for less than three weeks. many people call in sick because of a lack of motivation to go to work and poor working conditions. "

Globally, Tesla set a record for this year's job openings in November and is hiring nearly 7500 jobs, double the number hired in mid-June. Most of these jobs are in the United States, with Germany in second place. On November 11, the Berlin factory posted 386 jobs, including recruiters.

German labour experts say Tesla is unlikely to find more qualified staff to fill the vacancies because Tesla has always been seen as an unattractive employer in the German auto industry, where unionisation is prevalent. And it also needs to compete with competitors such as Volkswagen for skilled workers in Berlin.

The job center in Frankfurt (on the River Oder) said on October 4 that Tesla had hired 1000 previously unemployed workers, calling it the largest recruitment campaign since the reunification of Germany and Germany. According to local media statistics, Tesla is already the largest private employer in Brandenburg.

But IG Metall, the German metal workers' union, found that Tesla was paid 20 per cent less than similar companies, based on employee contracts and job descriptions. A spokesman for the agency said: "We have learned from the active members of IG Metall that Tesla's recruitment campaign did not meet expectations."

Holger Bonin (Holger Bonin), research director of the Institute for Labour Economics (Institute of Labor Economics) in Bonn, says this is a common problem in the German professional job market. Many qualified workers in the Berlin area can easily go to work at Volkswagen's Wolfsburg factory, which is clearly bad for Tesla.

Bonin added: "fundamentally, despite the COVID-19 epidemic and inflation, employment in the German labour market is still at an all-time high. There is a shortage of qualified workers everywhere. All potential employees have been hired, which makes it very difficult to fill vacant positions."

About 10 per cent of the staff at Tesla's Berlin factory are foreign workers, most of them from neighbouring Poland. The factory is only 90 kilometers from the border, and Tesla had hoped to hire Polish-speaking managers to attract more Polish workers. But Polish media reported that the move failed because Tesla asked employees to speak German.

The understaffing is just the latest setback for Tesla's Berlin factory, which already faces many challenges. Before opening, the factory was protested by environmentalists because it endangered endangered animals and caused deforestation and water pollution. In September, the fire brigade at Tesla's factory was unable to put out a huge cardboard fire by itself and had to turn to the local fire station for help. A later investigation found that Tesla did not install a fire alarm.

Last year, Tesla fell from the second-largest employer of choice for German engineering graduates after Google to sixth place. Now, the company lags behind German carmakers such as Porsche. Many respondents pointed out that Musk's comments about firing home-based workers had a negative impact.

At the end of October, Tesla's Berlin factory reached its target of producing 2000 Model Ys a week. This means that production at the factory has doubled since June. But even if they continue to increase production at this rate, by the end of this year, they are still a long way from achieving their target of producing 5000 cars a week.

The output of the Berlin factory is also much lower than that of Tesla's other factories. Troy Teslike, a service that tracks Tesla's production and sales data, points out that Tesla's Shanghai plant produced 20, 000 cars within 100 days of production, compared with 151 days at the Texas plant in the US and 187 days at the Berlin plant.

People familiar with the matter said that one of the reasons for this "production deficit" was that the original three-shift system had been postponed to keep the factory running 24 hours a day. Tesla originally planned to implement the three-shift system in September 2022, while the third shift will require production workers to change their shift patterns every day for seven working days.

'many employees are dissatisfied with this and complain that they don't have these conditions in the original contract, which exacerbates the previous problem of staff turnover, 'said one current employee. "people in the human resources department want to meet their recruitment goals, so they make countless promises to attract people, but they don't care if the company can retain these employees," he said. "

A former employee left Tesla together with other employees in September this year after working for more than a year. He describes that their working conditions sometimes change suddenly. When the contract was first signed, for example, it was clearly stated that employees must be "willing to work on weekends and nights". Employees interpret this as occasional overtime at night and on weekends under special circumstances.

However, without any warning, their contract changed the nature of their work, requiring them to work morning, night and weekend shifts. "two months later, they changed my shift to three shifts around the clock," the former employee said. my son is still very young, which is difficult for me to deal with. "

Tesla tried to improve recruitment and retention by raising the pay of new employees, but the effort also had a negative impact, as long-term employees complained that they were paid less than new employees with similar qualifications in the same job. In the German car industry, this is usually impossible because workers are usually paid by unions in consultation with employers.

This triggered a conflict between Tesla and the German IG Metall union, which the German Federation of employers' Associations said was "a threat to the social partnership model of cooperation between German companies and trade unions". Tesla was threatened by IG Metall's legal action, prompting it to eventually raise employees' overall salaries by 6 per cent. But unions say inequality still exists.

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