Bosses at Tesla’s German Gigafactory are reportedly knocking on some workers’ doors when they’re at home sick

Elon Musk said on X that he’d investigate rising rates of illness at Tesla’s Berlin plant.

Some Tesla workers have received visits at home from managers while off sick, according to a report from German newspaper Handelsblatt, which cited a recording of an internal meeting.

Handelsblatt said that when receiving such visits, some workers threatened to call the police, and others slammed the door in the managers’ faces.

This coincides, Handelsblatt reported, with the rate of employees at Tesla’s Berlin Gigafactory who called in sick jumping to 17% in August — over three times the average for the German auto industry last year.

Dirk Schulze, a regional chief at the German metalworkers’ union IG Metall, told Bloomberg the apparent home visits were “absurd.”

He added that Tesla workers report “extremely high workloads,” with management pressuring those who are out sick as healthy employees are overloaded with additional work.

Elon Musk has said he will investigate the report.

“This sounds crazy. Looking into it,” Musk replied to X user Alex Tourville, who shared a synopsis of Handelsblatt’s report.
This sounds crazy. Looking into it.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 26, 2024
In January, Musk warned Tesla workers to prepare for a ramped-up workload as he previewed plans for a mass-market EV.

“We really need the engineers to be living on the line,” the billionaire told investors on an earnings call. “We’ll be sleeping on the line, practically. Not practically, we will be.”

A former worker at Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California, told The Verge that employees would sleep on the floor after 12-hour shifts.

Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment from B-17.

This isn’t the first time that Musk has grown concerned about employees’ absences.

In 2022, shortly after he took over X, Musk complained that because the company’s San Francisco headquarters was about 90% empty, its free-lunch perk cost it more than $400 per meal. That office has now been closed, with X’s HQ relocated to Austin, Texas.