Tesla: $5 an Hour 'Unacceptable', Company Will 'Do Right' by Workers

Tesla Motors responded quickly to a bombshell exposé on the low-paid foreign workers helping to expand the company’s California assembly plant.

The investigation by the Bay Area News Group, published in The Mercury News, detailed the hundreds of Slovenian and Croatian laborers brought into the Freemont plant on business visas last year to build a paint shop. Paid $5 an hour, safety protocol among the group was lax, work hours were long, and a serious injury ended in a workers’ compensation lawsuit.

Tesla was cleared of any wrongdoing by an accident investigator, but now the company says it has a moral responsibility to stop all unsafe and unfair work practices at its facility.

The workers, including injured Gregor Lesnik, were recruited by ISM Vuzem, a Slovenian subcontractor brought in by Eisenmann, the German company tasked with building Tesla’s paint shop.

Lesnik’s lawsuit saw all three companies deny responsibility for the worker, who fell three stories from the roof of the shop.

“When Mr. Lesnik brought a workers compensation case, Tesla was dismissed from the case because the judge concluded that we had no legal responsibility for what occurred,” the company stated in their response to the growing controversy.

“All of that is fine legally, but there is a larger point. Morally, we need to give Mr. Lesnik the benefit of the doubt and we need to take care of him. We will make sure this happens.”

The company said it plans to work with the contractor and subcontractor in investigating the matter, and will correct all cases of unfair treatment. Tesla said it doesn’t agree with workers coming to its factory under the conditions described in the article, calling the practice of paying laborers $5 an hour “totally unacceptable.”

“Creating a new car company is extremely difficult and fraught with risk, but we will never be a company that by our action does, or by our inaction allows, the wrong thing to happen just to save money,” Tesla stated.

The electric automaker is ramping up the production capacity of its Fremont factory to handle a greater volume of existing models, as well as the upcoming Model 3, which has 400,000 reservations. The timeline for the Model 3 is tight, with production expected to start in late 2017.