Tesla cut around 200 jobs from the Autopilot program as it is closing down its premises in San Mateo, California. Most of the people affected were hourly workers, despite Elon Musk’s announcement on boosting hourly jobs and cutting down 10 percent of the salaried jobs at Tesla in the course of the next three months.
The San Mateo offices employed around 350 people, with 200 of the workforce being laid off, and others already relocated to nearby facilities. As reported by Bloomberg citing an unnamed source, the teams on these premises were evaluating Autopilot-related data gathered from customer vehicles, with many of them being annotation specialists.
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This practice is known as data labeling, with staff practicing it in Tesla’s offices in Buffalo, and New York. According to another source, the hourly rate in Buffalo is lower than in San Mateo for Tesla workers doing the same job. Tesla didn’t comment on the matter. Following the news, Tesla shares fell by 1.3 percent, to an overall 34 percent decline from the start of the year.
The company is on a quest to downsize its workforce following a hiring spree in previous years that resulted in around 100,000 employees on a global scale. The cuts will be focused on areas that recently saw a fast growth, which means that some of the people losing their jobs only had them for a short period of time.
Elon Musk recently shared his concerns about the challenging economic environment, while describing the new Tesla factories in Austin, US, and Berlin, Germany, as “gigantic money furnaces” that are losing billions of dollars at the moment.
