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- Most workers were in moderately low-skilled, low-paying jobs
- Tesla employs over 100,000 people at its facilities
- A team of lawyers representing former Tesla employees has sought emergency protection
Tesla has laid off 229 annotation employees from its Autopilot team and closed one of its offices in the United States. According to a regulatory filing in the US state of California and seen by TechCrunch, Elon Musk-run Tesla fired employees from its San Mateo office that employed 276 employees.
According to the report, the remaining 47 employees may be sent to work at Tesla’s Buffalo Autopilot office.
“Most of the workers were in moderately low-skilled, low-paying jobs, such as Autopilot data labeling, which involves determining whether Tesla’s algorithms recognized an object well or poorly,” the report said.
The layoffs are part of a 10 percent reduction in the salaried workforce, announced by Tesla CEO Elon Musk last month.
Musk’s announcement comes after Tesla began laying off salaried employees, which would result in a reduction of about 3.5 percent of Tesla’s total workforce.
Tesla employs more than 100,000 people at its facilities.
A team of lawyers representing former Tesla employees who were fired last month has sought emergency protection for the fired employees from a US court.
In a motion filed in the US District Court for the Western District of Texas, lawyers asked the judge to “restrict Tesla’s ability to continue seeking release from employees in exchange for a week’s severance.”
The plaintiffs alleged that the company did not provide the 60 days advance notice required by federal law during the layoffs.
Tesla employees John Lynch and Daxton Hartsfield were asked last month to move from Tesla’s Gigafactory 2 in the US state of Nevada, along with more than 500 other employees.
(With inputs from IANS)
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