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Tesla workers in Germany have received home visits from managers when they were sick, a German newspaper reported.
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Handelsblatt said the sickness rate at the Berlin Gigafactory is more than three times the industry average.
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Elon Musk says he will look into the high sick leave rates.
Some Tesla workers have been visited at home by managers when they were sick, according to a German newspaper report Handelsblatt, which referred to a recording of an internal meeting.
Handelsblatt said that when they received such visits, some workers threatened to call the police and others slammed the door in the managers’ faces.
This coincides, Handelsblatt reported, with the number of employees at Tesla’s Berlin Gigafactory who called in sick and jumped to 17% in August — more than three times the average for the German auto industry last year.
Dirk Schulze, regional director of the German metalworkers’ union IG Metall, told us Bloomberg the apparent home visits were “absurd”.
He added that Tesla workers report “extremely high workloads,” with management pushing those who are sick because healthy employees are overloaded with extra work.
Elon Musk has said he will look into the report.
“This sounds crazy. Looking into it,” Musk replied to X user Alex Tourville, who shared a summary of Handelsblatt’s report.
In January, Musk warned Tesla workers to prepare for an increased workload when he previewed plans for a mass-market EV.
“We really need the engineers to live the line,” the billionaire told investors on an earnings call. “We’ll sleep on the line, practically. Not practical, we’ll be.”
A former worker at Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California, told The Verge that employees would sleeping on the floor after 12-hour shifts.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
It’s not the first time Musk has been concerned about employee absenteeism.
In 2022, shortly after taking over X, Musk complained that since the company’s headquarters in San Francisco was about 90% empty, the free lunch benefit costs more than $400 per meal. That office has now been closed, with X’s headquarters moving to Austin, Texas.
Read the original article at Business Insider