Tesla wants government out of his tweets

Tesla is discussing the matter with the National Labor Relations Board, but it is not about suppressing unions or poor working conditions. In fact, wait, this is about it. But it’s also about a tweet. All this and more in The morning shift for April 5, 2021.

1st gear: Elon’s tweets must remain Unrestricted

It will always be interesting to see where a company stands. Those are the important questions for this business. In Tesla’s case, Elon being free to tweet whatever he wants, driving stock prices into a frenzy, is a vital part of the operation. We know this because Tesla is willing to fight for it, because Reuters reports:

The electric car maker filed a petition on Friday in the United States Court of Appeals, based in New Orleans, to review the NLRB decision and the order issued on March 25.

In the petition, Tesla asked the court to review the order and grant Tesla “any additional relief that the Court deems fair and equitable.”

Last month, the NRLB ordered Tesla to instruct Musk to delete the tweet and to post a notice addressing the illegal tweet at all of its facilities across the country and to include language that says “WE will take appropriate steps to ensure that Musk complies our directive. “

To be fair, the tweet in question was not a joke by Harambe or some encouragement by Dogecoin, but Elon claiming that Tesla had not necessity to the union bust, as it already has a very safe working environment, thank you very much!

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

The National Road Traffic Safety Administration was able to put pressure on Hyundai and Kia infor recalls and a recent $ 210 million deal on seized and burning engines. The man in charge was a whistleblower, Kim Gwang-ho. Congress ordered NHTSA to establish a program to pay him for his problems in 2015.

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

After voicing his concerns, Kim lost his job, was sued by Hyundai for allegedly leaking business secrets and had his home on the outskirts of Seoul searched by the police. Now, Mr. Kim said he is not sure when or if he will be compensated for the role he said he played in an investigation that led to a record deal made by NHTSA with the automaker and its sister company. Kia Corp. last year for up to $ 210 million.

“I hope that all these pains and all those difficult days will finally be rewarded,” said Kim, 59, in an interview through an interpreter.

Kim’s lawyers said they believed their payment would be at least $ 13.7 million, based on the formula stipulated by law, and potentially more if companies paid deferred fines.

The program mandated by Congress has not yet been established and Kim has not yet been paid.

3rd gear: Italian application drivers attacking in the most Italian way possible

Italy may be the newest battleground for application driver rights, as the Financial Times explains in a new report. While the current national labor crisis in the United States revolves around Amazon workers and drivers peeing in bottles, in Italy the fines are increasing, as the FT details:

Last year, Daniele, a third-party delivery driver for Amazon in Italy, noticed that hundreds of euros in traffic tickets were being deducted from his € 1,600 monthly salary. But far from being a careless driver, he said, his speeding and parking violations were necessary due to the company’s demanding schedule.

“We are hostage to 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 at Castel San Giovanni last week because of working conditions at Amazon. He stopped in front of a sign that said: “We are people, not packages”.

Amazon Italia rejected the suggestion that delivery providers be unduly pressured by the company’s algorithm, arguing that its workers are all beneficiaries of national collective bargaining.

Still, Daniele – who declined to give his last name – insisted that workers “must deliver a package every three minutes. Of course, we accelerate or park the van on sidewalks, and then the company makes us pay the fines ”.

As much as I love the comedy of Italian app drivers demanding that their speeding tickets be covered as work expenses, they are right. Application drivers work for your applications, they work as employees, they make money from your applications as employees do, but they are not treated with the same benefits as employees.

4th gear: Ford executives still have pandemic bonuses

I’m not here to judge whether any Ford executive deserves a bonus after struggling to launch a handful of cars during the pandemic. I’m just here to tell you how much more they are earning, via Automotive News:

Ford Motor Co.’s top executives achieved less than a quarter of their 2020 performance targets, up from 54 percent the previous year, but the automaker’s compensation committee changed the real-time bonus criteria to reward some leaders for their response to the pandemic.

Jim Hackett, who retired as CEO on October 1, received the biggest pandemic bonus: $ 1.26 million. His successor, Jim Farley, received $ 685,330. Executive President Bill Ford – whose accomplishments cited in the company’s power of attorney process included being named Industry Leader of the Year by Automotive News – received an extra $ 405,000.

5th gear: BMW, Volvo and others oppose offshore mining

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

For years, it was only environmental groups that opposed the idea of ​​digging up metals from the seabed. But now BMW, Volvo, Google and Samsung are lending their weight to calls for a moratorium on the proposals. The move has been criticized by companies behind offshore mining plans, which say the practice is more sustainable in the ocean than on land. The concept, initially envisaged in the 1960s, is extract billions of rocks the size of potatoes called nodules of the abyssal plains of the oceans several kilometers deep. Rich in valuable minerals, these nodules have long been considered the source of a new type of gold rush that could fuel the global economy for centuries.

Reverse: I can’t imagine what it was like