Tesla wants the government out of its tweets

Tesla is working with the National Labor Relations Council, but it’s not about oppressing unions or poor working conditions. Actually, 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 stay Unlimited

It will always be interesting to see where a company digs its heels. These are the issues that are important to that business. In the case of Tesla, Elon is free to tweet as he feels like it, and driving stock prices to a frenzy is an important part of the operation. We know this because Tesla is willing to fight over it, like Reuters reports:

The manufacturer of electric cars filed a petition with the U.S. Court of Appeal in New Orleans on Friday to review the ruling and order of NLRB on March 25.

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

Last month, the NRLB ordered Tesla to order Musk to delete the tweet and post a notice about the illegal tweet at all its facilities nationwide and include language that reads: “WE WILL take appropriate steps to ensure that Musk comply with our requirements. “

To be honest, the tweet in question was not a Harambe joke or some Dogecoin boost, but Elon claims that Tesla has no need to union-bust, as it already has a very safe workplace, thank you very much!

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

The national traffic safety administration was able to push in Hyundai and Kiato memories and a recent $ 210 million settlement on engines that grab and catch fire. The man in charge was a whistleblower, Kim Gwang-ho. Congress ordered NHTSA to draw up a program to pay him for his 2015 effort.

How many problems are we talking about here? That’s a good $ 13.7 million Wall Street Journal details:

Nadat mnr. Kim lost his job, lost his job, was sued by Hyundai for allegedly leaking trade secrets and searched his home outside Seoul by police. Mr. Kim said he was unsure whether he would be compensated for the role he said he played in an investigation that led to a record deal reached by NHTSA with the carmaker and sister company. Kia Corp. last year for up to $ 210 million.

“I hope that all these pains and all these difficult days will be finally rewarded,” said Mr. Kim, 59, said during an interview by an interpreter.

Kim’s lawyers said they believed his payout would amount to at least $ 13.7 million, based on the formula outlined by the law, and that the companies might pay deferred fines.

The program ordered by Congress has still not been drawn up, and Kim has still not been paid.

3rd gear: Italian app managers in the most Italian way possible

Italy is perhaps the latest battlefield for the rights of app managers, such as the Financial Times explained in a new report. While America’s current national job crisis revolves around Amazon workers and drivers peeing in bottles, in Italy, it’s chasing fast tickets, as the FT details:

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

“We are being held hostage by 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 in Castel San Giovanni last week over working conditions at Amazon. He stood in front of a sign that read, “We are not packages.”

Amazon Italia rejected the proposal that delivery suppliers be put under unnecessary pressure by the company’s algorithm, arguing that its employees are all beneficiaries of national collective bargaining.

But Daniele, who did not want to name his surname, insisted that employees be expected to deliver one package every three minutes. Of course we drive, or we park the van on driveways, and then the company makes us pay fines. ”

I like the comedy of Italian app drivers demanding that their speeding tickets be covered as labor costs, but that has a point. App managers work for their apps, they work as employees, they earn money for their apps like employees, but are not treated with the same benefits as employees.

4th gear: Ford Execs still gets pandemic bonuses

I’m not here to judge whether any Ford driver deserves a bonus after struggling to launch a handful of cars through the pandemic. I’m just here to tell you how much more they earn, via Motor News:

Ford Motor Co. ‘s top executives achieved less than a quarter of their performance targets in 2020, up from 54 percent the previous year, but the carmaker’s remuneration committee changed the criteria for in-flight bonuses 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 Chairman Bill Ford – whose achievements in the company’s power of attorney submission are named as the industry leader of the year, among others Motor News – received an extra $ 405,000.

5th gear: BMW, Volvo, and others are against deep-sea mining

I do not know if the exploitation of the seabed is the biggest possible problem facing the world today, but it scares the shit out of me. A number of companies, including BMW and Volvo, are also opposed to it, such as the BBC reports:

For years, it was only environmental groups that objected to the idea of ​​digging up metals from the deep sea, but now BMW, Volvo, Google and Samsung are giving their weight to the calls for a moratorium on the proposals. behind the deep-sea mining plans, which say the use is more sustainable in the ocean than on land. The concept, first envisioned in the 1960s, is to extract billions of potato-sized rocks called nodules from the abysses of the oceans a few kilometers deep. These nodules are rich in valuable minerals and have long been valued as the source of a new kind of gold rush that could supply the world economy for centuries.

Reverse: I can not imagine what it was like