Tesla wants the government out of its tweets

Tesla is starting to talk about it with the National Labor Relations Board, but it’s not about trade union oppression or poor working conditions. Actually wait, that’s what it’s about. But it is also about a tweet. All that and more in it The morning shift before April 5, 2021.

1st gear: Elon’s tweets should stay Casual

It will always be interesting to see where a company is headed. These are the issues that are important to that business. In Tesla’s case, Elon’s freedom to tweet whatever he likes, driving stock prices into a frenzy is a vital part of the operation. We know this because Tesla is willing to fight about it, like Reuters reports:

The electric car maker on Friday filed a petition with the New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals to review the NLRB’s March 25 decision and order.

In the petition, Tesla asked the court to reconsider the order and grant Tesla “any further exemption that the court considers fair and equitable.”

Last month, the NRLB ordered Tesla to order Musk to remove the tweet and post a message addressing the illegal tweet in all its offices across the country and including language that says, “WE WILL take appropriate steps to ensure that to make sure Musk complies with our guideline. “

To be fair, the tweet in question wasn’t a Harambe joke or a Dogecoin boost, but Elon claims Tesla isn’t need to union breakdown as it already has a very safe workplace, thank you very much!

2nd Gear: NHTSA is quite active for an organization that owes this whistleblower $ 13.7 million

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was able to put pressure on Hyundai and Kiarecalls and a recent $ 210 million settlement for engine seizure and catching fire. The man responsible was a whistleblower named Kim Gwang-ho. Congress ordered the NHTSA to set up a program to pay him for his troubles as early as 2015.

How much trouble are we talking about here? It’s a good $ 13.7 million as the Wall Street Journal details:

After raising his concerns, Mr. Kim’s job, he was sued by Hyundai for allegedly leaking trade secrets and had police search his home outside of Seoul. Now, Mr. Kim said he is unsure when or if he will be compensated for the role he says he played in an investigation that led to a record settlement the NHTSA reached with the automaker and its sister company. Which Corp. last year for up to $ 210 million.

“I am hoping that all these pains and all these difficult days will finally be rewarded,” said 59-year-old Mr Kim in an interview through an interpreter.

Mr. Kim’s attorneys said they believe his payout would be at least $ 13.7 million, based on the formula set out by law, and potentially more the companies would have to pay deferred fines.

The Congress-mandated program has still not been set up and Kim has still not been paid.

3rd gear: Italian app drivers hit the most Italian way possible

Italy is arguably the newest battleground for app driver rights, such as the Financial times explains in a new report. While America’s current national work crisis revolves around Amazon workers and drivers peeing bottles, in Italy they are speeding, as the FT describes:

Last year, Daniele, a third-party delivery company for Amazon in Italy, noted that hundreds of dollars in traffic tickets were being deducted from his monthly salary of € 1,600. But anything but a careless driver, he claimed, his speeding and parking violations were necessitated by the company’s demanding schedule.

“We are held hostage by an algorithm that calculates daily routes for us and requires an average of 140 deliveries during an eight-hour shift,” he said during a strike in Castel San Giovanni last week about working conditions at Amazon. He was standing in front of a sign that said, “We are humans, not packages.”

Amazon Italia rejected the suggestion that delivery drivers are being put under undue pressure by the company’s algorithm, arguing that all of the company’s employees benefit from national collective bargaining.

But Daniele – who refused to give his last name – insisted that workers “deliver a package every three minutes. Of course we speed up or park the van in driveways and then the company makes us pay the fines. “

As much as I love the comedy of Italian app drivers demanding their speeding tickets be covered as a work expense, they do have a point. App drivers work for their apps, they work as employees, they make money for their apps the way employees do, but they don’t get the same benefits as employees.

4th Gear: Ford Execs still have pandemic bonuses

I’m not here to judge whether a Ford executive deserves a bonus after struggling to launch a handful of cars through the pandemic. I’m just here to tell you how much else they make, through Automotive News

The top executives of Ford Motor Co. reached less than a quarter of their performance targets by 2020, up from 54 percent the year before, but the automaker’s compensation committee changed the criteria for on-the-fly bonuses to reward some leaders for their response to the pandemic.

Jim Hackett, who retired as CEO on October 1, received the largest pandemic bonus: $ 1.26 million. His successor, Jim Farley, received $ 685,330. Executive Chairman Bill Ford – whose achievements were named in the company’s proxy filing, including being named Industry Leader of the Year by Automotive News – received an additional $ 405,000.

5th gear: BMW, Volvo and others oppose deep-sea mining

I don’t know if mining the seabed is the biggest possible problem facing the world today, but it really scares me. A number of companies, including BMW and Volvo, are also against it, as is the BBC reports:

For years, it was only environmental groups that objected to the idea of ​​digging up metals from the deep sea, but now BMW, Volvo, Google and Samsung are doing their part in calling for a moratorium on the proposals. behind the deep-sea mining plans, which say the practice is more sustainable in the ocean than on land. extract billions of stones the size of a potato called nodules from the precipice of the oceans several miles deep. Rich in valuable minerals, these nodules have long been valued as the source of a new kind of gold rush that could supply the global economy for centuries.

Downside: I can’t imagine what this was like