With many of the 55,000-strong workforce of Tesla scared to return to work, the Company is now trying to assure its employees that no serious coronavirus outbreak has taken place at any of its facilities across the world.
According to a report on an electric vehicle industry website, which claims to be based on internal data from Tesla, more than 130 staff members of the auto manufacturing company have tested positive for COVID-19 and several hundreds are being tested. Naturally, the employees have been wary of returning to work.
To allay their fears, the Company’s vice president for environment, safety and health, sent out an official e-mail to the staff assuring them that no major outbreak has happened at any of the Tesla facilities worldwide. She confirmed that less than 0.25 per cent of the workforce, globally, has tested positive, which is only about 137 employees. She also assured the employees that the figure reported on the website pertaining to the hundreds who have tested positive, referred to data on infections caught outside the workplace. She also pointed out that the figure took into account employees who may have caught the infection but never set foot inside any of the Tesla facilities, or may have tested positive at home during the lockdown when the Tesla facilities were shut.
The employees have been told that hardly ten cases have resulted from the virus being transmitted at work, since January.
The e-mail assured that no Tesla employee had been seriously affected by the virus; that most of the COVID-19 positive cases involved employees who had caught it from their family members or from those they were travelling with; and that all the concerned reported for work only after they had recovered fully at home. The employees have also been assured of a safe, sanitised, clean and protected work environment, and have been warned of disciplinary action if people are seen breaking rules, such as wearing masks.