A spokeswoman for the company said 300 temporary workers were fired, adding that “Tesla workers were not fired.” The Business Insider news portal previously announced that the contracts of fixed-term workers will not be extended.
“As far as we know, our contractual partner is moreć managed to transfer most of those workers with fixed-term contracts to new jobs at other clients,” said the Tesla spokeswoman.
In March, the company announced that it had hired several hundred workers ‘for a limited time’ at the factory in the town of Grünheide, near Berlin.
On Monday, Tesla announced that it would lay off more than a dozen of its workforce worldwide, which would mean layoffs for some 14,000 employees. The company did not state the exact figure, and according to the annual report for 2023, they employed 140,473 workers in December.
“In the company’s preparations for our next phase of growth, it is extremely important to study every aspect (…) to determine opportunities to reduce costs and improve productivity,” CEO Elon wrote in a letter to employees on Monday. Musk.
“As part of these efforts, we thoroughly analyzed the organization and made the difficult decision to reduce our number of employees by more than 10 percent globally,” the document states.
The factory in Germany currently employs more than 12,000 workers.
Musk announced layoffs for 10 percent of workers in 2022 as well, telling executives, as Reuters reported at the time, that he had a “bad feeling that the economy is not doing well.” To date, the company has not stated how many workers it will lay off in 2022, and their number has increased in the meantime.
At the beginning of the month, Tesla preliminarily reported that it delivered approximately 387 thousand vehicles in the first quarter, approximately eight percent less than in the first three months of 2023, excluding, among other things, the crisis in the Red Sea and arson in the plant near Berlin.
The company cut prices several times last year to keep up with demand, resulting in a 40 percent jump in sales and 1.8 million cars sold. At the end of the year, revenue slowed sharply, to only three percent, and the management warned that it expects significantly weaker growth in 2024.