The boss of a Tesla factory has defended the decision to send managers to the homes of workers on long-term sick leave.
In recent weeks, a director of Tesla’s electric car plant in Germany sent managers to check up on about two dozen employees who have continued to be paid while being on sick leave over the past nine months.
André Thierig, the plant’s manufacturing director, said the home visits were common practice in the industry and that the company simply wanted to “appeal to the employees’ work ethic”.
The move by Elon Musk’s US-headquartered carmaker has sparked outrage at the trade union IG Metall, which represents a proportion of the 12,000 workers at the Berlin-Brandenburg gigafactory.
German law. To be more precise for a court to accept a company’s claim that continued employment would be an undue burden they want to see a) at least six weeks in a year b) negative prognosis, and c) how impactful the whole thing is for things like scheduling, that also depends on company size. Seniority also plays into it but noone at Tesla has any kind of seniority. That is, if healing from a burst appendix takes seven weeks no you don’t have a case because appendices don’t tend to burst twice, if your employee first breaks their leg and then goes base jumping again and breaks their arm and then does it again and breaks the other leg, different topic.
Companies are of course not forced to terminate you and a car manufacturer might be well-advised to retain a hard to replace star engineer, a random replaceable accountant, not so much.
IG Metall has a page about it. It also pays to pay your union dues because they all come with legal insurance. Thinking of it IG Metall might have the second largest army of lawyers in the world, right after Oracle.