- Tesla has again laid off 601 employees at its two plants in Palo Alto and Freemont in California.
Despite the backlash, Tesla is continuing its layoff spree. The electric car manufacturer has fired 601 more employees at its California plant, which took the total job cut count to nearly 6,000 since the beginning of the year, Reuters has reported. The EV manufacturer started laying off a large chunk of its global workforce earlier this year in an attempt to cut operational costs and streamline its overall global operations, as the company’s CEO Elon Musk revealed. Tesla announced that it will slash 10 per cent of its global workforce.
The report revealed that Teasla filed paperwork on Monday with the State of California indicating that 223 people at its Palo Alto plant and 378 people from its Freemont factor would be laid off permanently. These layoffs will begin on 20th June this year, revealed the filing. However, it is unclear if affected employees know about their fate yet.
Palo Alto is one of Tesla’s key development and manufacturing hubs as the plant designs and builds powertrain equipment and serves as the engineering headquarters for the entire brand. On the other hand, the Freemont factory serves as a full-time production facility with five assembly lines. Tesla builds every model on sale today at this facility except the Cybertruck. In a nutshell, both these two locations are vital to the brand’s global success.
SFChronicle has reported that over two weeks by mid-June this year, Tesl will fire 600 workers. Combining these cuts with more than 2,700 job cuts announced in the Bay Area earlier this year and 2,688 employees axed in Texas, the EV manufacturer has removed at least 5,989 jobs so far in 2024. This comes in line with the 6,020 employees the company predicted it would cut earlier this year.
Tesla at some point employed some 140,000 people worldwide and now aims to reduce its workforce by 10 per cent. The recent cuts indicate that the company is only about halfway through the layoffs. Ultimately, the automaker is trying to reduce overhead and increase efficiency across the workforce, after it saw huge drops in revenue and profit in the first quarter of 2024.
First Published Date: 15 May 2024, 09:34 AM IST