Tesla lays off 300 temporary workers at Gigafactory in Grünheide

The wave of redundancies at Tesla also seems to be rolling towards Germany. At the Gigafactory in Grünheide near Berlin, 300 workers now have to leave the plant. However, these are “only” temporary workers for the time being.

Tesla starts with layoffs

Things are anything but good at Tesla at the moment. As we reported at the beginning of the week, the company is being forced to lay off employees due to a slump in sales figures. A total of 10 percent of the global workforce will probably have to leave their jobs. That equates to around 14,000 people.

It is therefore all the more understandable that the workforce at the Gigafactory in Grünheide is also feeling anxious at the moment. The huge plant near Berlin has a total of 12,500 employees. If Musk were to distribute his redundancies fairly geographically, 1,250 employees would have to leave the electric car manufacturer’s only European plant alone. Now it seems that the first ones have been affected. However, Tesla did not lay off any employees with traditional employment contracts.

As the company told dpa, “300 temporary workers have been deregistered in due time – this is not a termination of Tesla employees.” In order to keep the negative headlines in check, the company spokeswoman responsible added that the temporary workers concerned had “already been transferred to new employment with other customers”.

Number of redundancies is uncertain

However, the reference to the fact that these are “only” temporary workers does not yet clarify the main question that is currently plaguing the workforce at Tesla in Grünheide in particular. How many of them will be affected by the wave of redundancies? As the Handelsblatt reports, the management of the Gigafactory is planning to convene a staff meeting next week.

The report mentions an email sent to the plant’s employees. It states that the management plans to give its employees “an initial update on the next steps in the coming week”. There is also said to have been another email from CEO Elon Musk himself. In it, he is said to have apologized for the fact that the initial severance offers were significantly too low.