Elon Musk’s company that makes luxury electric cars, Tesla, is facing allegations of staffing its Fremont, Calif., factory with possibly illegal, imported, low-paid subcontractors. This includes 140 workers from Croatia and Slovenia who were paid less than $5 per hour to expand the facility that manufactures Tesla cars.
The workers were brought in via B-1 Visas to work for Tesla, and paid about $5 per hour as subcontractors, the San Jose Mercury News reported recently. The newspaper found they worked long hours at the pay rate, in violation of U.S. labor laws, and in violation of California’s minimum wage, which is $10 per hour.
The Mercury News featured the story of one Slovenian worker, who sustained multiple injuries in 2015 after falling 30 feet to the factory floor. He is suing Tesla and the contractors involved in building the factory. The lawsuit claims violations of B-1 Visa requirements, as well as wage and employment laws, and claims the workers involved are due $2.6 million in unpaid wages and overtime, MarketWatch reported.
“The labor practices contrast with Tesla’s image as the planet’s most innovative automaker, using technological ingenuity to manufacture cars in the heart of Silicon Valley. Tesla said it employs nearly 6,000 U.S. workers in the once-shuttered Fremont factory, all well-paying jobs that come with company equity. While bypassing American workers for low-cost foreign laborers may benefit automakers’ bottom line, Tesla said it had nothing to do with hiring the ones who built its paint shop,” the Mercury News reported.
Musk, the co-founder and chief executive of Tesla, tweeted on the allegations, “Only heard about this today. Sounds like the wrong thing happened on many levels. Will investigate and make it right.” This response sounds familiar, such as when President Obama responded to many scandals by telling reporters he hadn’t heard about it until it was reported in the news, and that he was just as outraged by it as they were.
The corporate empire built by Musk — which includes Tesla, solar panel manufacturer SolarCity and the space launch company SpaceX — have been propped up by nearly $5 billion in corporate welfare, thanks to taxpayers.
“He definitely goes where there is government money,” the Los Angeles Times quoted Dan Dolev, an analyst at Jefferies Equity Research, as saying about Musk. “That’s a great strategy, but the government will cut you off one day.”
That one day has come, or at least, it is due to have come. The investment in taxpayer dollars is not paying off, and Musk himself has lost about $155 million in the value of his stock ownership in those three companies. While SpaceX is profiting from huge government launch contracts that Musk’s cronies in Congress have helped to engineer, Tesla and SolarCity are losing money and value despite being so heavily subsidized. Despite the epic failure of two of his three companies, Musk himself is estimated to be worth $13.3 billion.
It’s time for Congress to shut off the corporate welfare for Musk and his heavily subsidized companies, and let them survive on their own in the free market.
Taxpayers have invested far too much already in these rackets and it’s time for it to end. If there are consumers for the products Musk wants to market, then he will sell them in sufficient quantities to profit from them. Otherwise, they don’t need to be sustained with billions in taxpayer benefits. It’s time for Musk to get off welfare.
