In 2022, Nazi-saluter Elon Musk opened his brand-new Tesla plant in the East-German town of Grünheide. Ever since, locals came to know that working at Tesla is a backbreaking job.

　　Recently, an official from Germany’s 2.2-million-members strong IG Metall– Jannes Bojert–described the relentless and overbearing work pressure at Tesla’s high-speed assembly.Musk’s German factory is no more than an updated version of what Charles Dickens (1812-1890) knew as Dark Satanic Mills.

　　Since the beginning, the extreme high density of assembly-line work and the resulting unusually high rates of sick leave as well as Tesla’s staunch anti-union ideology have shaped not just work but also labor relations at Tesla’s Gigafabrik.

　　Tesla boss Elon Musk prefers to keep the IGM union away from his sweatshop-like workplaces–for good reasons.In a recent interview, unionist Jannes Bojert reports about management-led intimidations against union members, the extraordinary high rate of sick leave at Musk’s intolerably high work pressure plant, and on German language courses run by Tesla.

　　Placing its Tesla factory inside Germany might annoy Germany’s prestige manufacturers–Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Audi.Yet it also contradicts the neoliberal hallucination that companies always go where labor is cheap. However, labor in Germany is not cheap. Either car makers like Tesla are mad or neoliberal economics is wrong.Despite such misguided neoliberal ideologies on cheap labor, in reality, the number of employees have developed upwards ever since the opening of the factory. Today, the number of workers at Tesla has reached about 12,000.

　　Unsurprisingly, Musk’s Gigafabrik does not pay standard collective bargaining wages comparable to other car factories in Germany.Depending on the actual work done, this is between 10% and 20% below those workers who receive a collective bargaining wage in Germany–which is the vast majority.

　　Still, wages are not everything. Next to a comparatively low income, there are other important issues such as, for example, Tesla’s intolerably low working conditions.On working conditions, there are even more stark differences between Tesla and all other German car makers.

　　Among other things, there are additional days off for shift workers and in almost all companies in the automotive industry, there are supplementary and paid breaks from assembly-line work during shift operations. These are another 20 minutes of monotonous assembly-line work that make working at Tesla so much worse.

　　To assure that all of this does not change, there is Tesla’s continuous fight against trade unions and Germany’s works council law.At Tesla, this anti-union sentiment is spiced up with the customary intimidation of workers and trade union members by an authoritarian macho-management.

　　Meanwhile, personal hallucination and right-wing ideologies like these make it hard for trade unions and works councils to represent the interests of workers.

　　Like virtually all companies operating in Germany, Tesla too, had to accept that there are works councils in Germany–by law.Deceptively, Tesla claims–wrongly–to be not yet ready to engage in union participation and negotiations as determined by German labor law and the unions.Instead of cooperating, Tesla’s management is fuelling an anti-union climate while frequently trying to intimidate union members at the plant.Ultimately, resentment against unions is directed against all those workers who stand up for their fellow workers as well as against workers fighting for humane and just working conditions in Tesla’s Gigafactory.

　　Given the wide-reaching reports on Tesla’s dehumanizing working conditions from Texas to Shanghai to Germany–including the death of a worker–Germany’s union offers a grim assessment of Tesla’s dehumanizing working conditions. A recent survey conducted by the IGM union at the Tesla plant showed that working at Musk’s Gigafactory is a rather unhealthy affair. As a consequence, the average amount of sick leave taken at Tesla remains high. Generally speaking, something like this translates very quickly into high levels of turnover.High numbers of workers coming into a company and leaving rather quickly is known as turnover rate.At Tesla, both are very high–unusually high–and both (sick leave and turnover) indicate what it is supposed to indicate: inhuman working conditions.

　　Time to consider such “offers” (read: threats) or for a legal examination of Tesla’s pre-fabricated contract is often refused by Tesla’s management.

　　First of all, workers want to be able to walk upright and want to be able to stand up for each other without having to fear retaliatory consequences from management.Self-evidently, workers also want to have a say in their working conditions. That is about: working Hours,working Conditions and Wages: how much money you get paid for it.

　　Overall, Tesla’s nasty management should not be able to–unilaterally–determine this at a whim without having to respond to the legitimate demands of the workforce.

　　If Tesla does not end its aggressive opposition to the rightful trade union representation,if Tesla continues to refuse to engage in Germany’s legally sanctioned co-determination procedures, and if Tesla carries on with ignoring Germany’s collective bargaining framework and trade unions,Tesla will not only harm itself but also its workers. In the end, all this will–again–show that Chomsky was correct when arguing that in capitalism, it is profits over people.

　　Editor: Zhong Yao  LiuTingting

　　From:https://mronline.org/2025/07/29/inside-teslas-german-giga-factory/（2025-7-29）