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by elp
1671 days ago
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What's magical about Tesla that its going to stay a non union shop? If every other car company has to deal with unions then its only a matter of time until they are as well. The only way they can prevent that is to pay more than the other places but then their profits wouldn't stay high. |
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I guess Tesla thinks they can afford a package attractive enough to compete with unions and then not needing to pay the dues will tip the scale in favor of keeping the company union free.
Then they will keep the agility they need so they can switch to things like gigapress or other labor-saving processes and lay off/reassign a bunch of workers in order to continue their relentless cost-cutting and process simplification.
Tesla values agility - of course all employers say that in order to escape unions, but Tesla is one of the few companies that is actually agile, rather than just talking about needing to be agile. It's amazing how fast they change production processes, and being union free is a big part of that.
Not sure whether this will work out for Tesla or not, since workers value stability and job security.
Both are valid goals. I'm also interested to see how Tesla will compete against the flood of cheap EVs that will be coming from China. Doug Munro is convinced that they will dominate the US market:
https://teslanorth.com/2021/11/07/china-evs-coming-for-u-s-a...
The next 10-20 years are going to be very hard on autoworkers and all the supporting industries, from parts suppliers to their suppliers, and the entire vast supporting industry which is about 5% of US employment and the single biggest component of our manufacturing sector.
It's also not clear how we can keep a defense industry in this country without auto-manufacturing.