Elon Musk-owned Tesla has laid off around 200 employees from their Autopilot team. Even the office situated in California has been shut down. The San Mateo Tesla location has also been closed in addition to the layoffs.
The Bloomberg report mentions that the majority of the people fired used to work on an hourly basis. Annotation specialists, many of whom were impacted, were responsible for analyzing and classifying customer-provided Autopilot data.
In the week prior, Musk had shared his plans to cut 10% of the salaries of staff and in turn increase hourly jobs.
In a company-wide email, Musk had warned his staff members that layoffs were imminent because he had a “very awful feeling” about the state of the economy.
Soon after Musk’s announcement, Tesla started laying off the employees which soon resulted in the company’s total headcount being cut by roughly 3.5%.
The report also states that Tesla employs more than 1,00,000 people across all its facilities.
Iain Abshier, one of the employees who was shown the door, in his LinkedIn had mentioned that he had “a gut punch” that he would also be part of the Tesla layoffs.
Robert Belovodskij, another sacked Tesla employee, said that he received notification that the offer he signed to return to Tesla full-time had been “rescinded due to the current hiring freeze and reduction of 10% workforce .”
Two of the 500 recently laid-off employees filed a lawsuit against Tesla Inc. a few days ago.
In essence, they were workers at Tesla’s Sparks, Nevada, Gigafactory, who alleged that the company had violated federal labor laws by failing to give adequate notice of the job layoffs.