Tesla union calls out a 'culture of fear' at a plant where managers visit the homes of workers out sick

Tesla’s (TSLA) sprawling German plant has had a rough year, marked with protests, arson, and even missing coffee mugs. Now, the automaker is grappling with workers allegedly abusing the automaker’s sick leave policy.

André Thierig, the manufacturing director at Tesla Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg, told workers recently that its rate of sick leave in the factory of 12,000 employees had risen to 17% as of August, Handelsblatt reports. That’s a big jump from the 5.2% Germany’s automotive industry reported in 2023 — and managers aren’t happy.

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“We will not tolerate some people bending their backs for others who just don’t feel like coming to work,” Thierig said. “There is no room in this factory for people who “don’t get out of bed in the morning.”

But Thierig went beyond simply chastising employees. Instead, top-level managers picked 30 employees who had been on sick leave and visited their homes. Unsurprisingly, workers weren’t very happy about their bosses knocking on their doors.

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“You could just tell by the aggression,” Erik Demmler, the plant’s head of human resources, reportedly said at the meeting. “By having the door slammed shut. By being threatened with the police. By being asked if you don’t have to make an appointment first.”

Thierig told The Guardian that such home visits aren’t unusual in the auto industry — although, according to The Local, such visits are relatively uncommon, but legal — and that the company wanted to “appeal” to employees’ work ethic. Some 200 full-time staffers are on payroll but haven’t showed up to work at all in 2024, according to the plant director.

“That is not an indicator of bad working conditions because the working conditions are the same on all working days and across all shifts. It suggests that the German social system is being exploited to some extent,” he told the Guardian.

But the trade union IG Metall contends that the factory operates with a “culture of fear.” That’s stressed workers out and caused sick-leaves rates to hit 15% or higher, according to the union, which has 16 members on the factory’s 39-person works council.

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“Employees from almost all areas of the factory have reported an extremely high workload,” Dirk Schulze, a regional director at the union, told the Guardian. “When there are staff shortages, the ill workers are put under pressure and those who remain healthy are overburdened with additional work.”

Workers can likely expect a higher degree of scrutiny in the near future, now that Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been notified of the issue.

“This sounds crazy. Looking into it,” he wrote on X (META) on Thursday evening.

Historically Musk has been unsympathetic to workers that don’t meet his standards. After buying Twitter, now called X, Musk issued mass firings and demanded workers be “extremely hardcore,” before cracking down on striking janitorial staff. Tesla laid off thousands of workers earlier this year, with Musk demanding executives fire employees who didn’t meet his standards.

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