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Tesla HR: choosing not to work may impact benefits

Tesla's HR is ruffling some feathers, announcing to employees that should they decide to not return to work immediately they could lose unemployment benefits.

Video Transcript

MYLES UDLAND: Let's turn now to Tesla, day four, standoff between the company and what is happening over in California. Dan Roberts, company now threatening that it will pull-- and I mean, I guess this is what happens when your company goes back to work. You can no longer file for unemployment insurance.

But the way that this Tesla situation has gone on publicly-- their tiff with the state, their tiff with the workers, the way Elon musk has behaved-- we now have the headline, which on the one hand is a technical matter, but on the other hand, like everything else with Telsa, is a PR matter about should the factory be open and has the company done the right thing?

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DAN ROBERTS: Well, I think you've summarized it well. And in some ways, it's a little bit like the battle between Softbank and WeWork, in the sense that people see the headlines and they say, look at these two bumbling companies that have done a lot wrong in the last year, and WeWork, especially. But people might assume, oh, WeWork's go no case, but actually, it's more about technicalities, and WeWork might have a case.

And similarly here, I think you're right. You see the headline and it looks like, wow, Tesla threatening employees who aren't comfortable coming back yet, and it's bad optics. But when you actually look at the technicalities here, all of the company and its head of HR is really saying is that if you're furlough ends and you're called back to the office, now you're not on furlough. Now you can't say you're unemployed and you can't collect unemployment benefits.

If you want to stay at home because you're still not comfortable coming in, go ahead and do it, but you can't say you're unemployed anymore. And that makes sense to me. Maybe it's an unpopular opinion. Now, that said, I'm not saying that everyone should immediately be comfortable, especially because, as we know, and this is the whole story, Elon Musk has reopened this place sooner than the authorities wanted and sooner than other companies have opened.

And he has been hasty with it, so I'm sure there are some Tesla employees who wouldn't be comfortable yet coming back in. And it sounds like if you wouldn't want to come in, fine. But if you have a job that requires you to be there, and they're saying, we've now reopened and you can come in, and you don't want to come in, well, you can't collect unemployment benefits.

And before we go to Melody, let me just say-- it's a little inside baseball here-- this story for us during quarantine has a little bit been like, you know, Brady signing with the Buccaneers for ESPN, or "The Last Dance" on ESPN. I mean, at least we have something interesting and juicy to discuss here. But I can tell you, Elon Musk does not care about the bad optics of this.

MELODY HAHM: Dan, I think it's way beyond bad optics. It's that workers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. There literally is no correct option because yeah, we're not talking about Twitter here, where you're a corporate employee that is on the internet all day. These are manufacturing employees. They are people who are engineers. They're people who have to collaborate, and be physical, and touching things on an assembly line that is unsafe.

It is completely unsafe for this to be opened fully. We still don't know what exactly the interiors look like, if there is actual adequate spacing in play. So yes, I totally get it. Of course, if you aren't working, you should be there.

But at the same time, if you are employed but you're kind of being pressured to come in, all I'm saying is that if you are getting unpaid leave during this time and you are being told by the HR boss that it's OK, it's OK if you don't want to come in, but you won't get paid for it, and won't be able to file for unemployment, there is so much anxiety tied to that choice.

It's not actually a choice because if you're not going to go into work because you feel unsafe, or because you have an elderly person in your home, or because you might have caught it somehow and you don't want to infect your other employees, then who will be the first to be laid off? Who will be the first to not be rehired? Who will be the first to actually be let go?

So I think, unfortunately, this sort of economic uncertainty doesn't allow for that choice a lot of the time. And Tesla is just one example, right? During the course of this pandemic, we have seen coffee shops, we have seen bars, we have seen restaurants-- the employees saying, hey, I don't actually feel safe going in. This shouldn't be deemed an essential job. People can make coffee at home.

So I guess that's the bigger question, right? What is essential? Should this business be open before anyone else, especially when the cleaning protocols are not fully in place?

DAN ROBERTS: Well, I think you're right, Melody. It goes beyond optics. It's a very hard choice. Now, Myles made a good point, too, about what if your kids are still at home and there's no school? Well, then, maybe you can't go in. Now, all that being said, just to play devil's advocate, you wonder if we continue out the timeline, you know, there are going to be people who, even once states have reopened and even once their offices reopen, they still aren't comfortable going in.

And so from the perspective of companies, well, where do you draw that line? I mean, you know, in the sports world, they're concerned that even once fans are allowed to come back, many won't feel comfortable doing so. Same with movie theaters. So if you're the company, well, at what point do they say, calendar-wise, look, now you got to come in. And if you're not going to come in, it's a tough one.

MYLES UDLAND: This feels like an entire new seminar on the philosophy of science or something that is being born out of all of this, and how public health-- what the moral choices inherent in public health policy really are. Not really something that I think we all believed 2020 would usher in, but of course, here--