And naturally, trying to fight back resulted in people being fired.
Trackathon
For about $20 per hour, an army of Tesla annotators review troves of video taken by test drivers and owners — and are forced to deal with absolutely bizarre workplace rules while doing so.
As Business Insider reports based on interviews with more than a dozen current and former Tesla workers on Tesla’s data annotation team, workers tasked with labeling footage to better build out the company’s mapping system seem to have their work cut out for them.
These employees said that not only did they have to sift through intimate and often disturbing moments captured by the electric vehicles’ cameras, but also are themselves closely tracked and monitored by their employer.
At one of its data annotation locations in Buffalo, New York, employees are subjected to two separate monitoring software systems: HuMans, which measures how long they spend on each clip and gives them performance reviews for it, and Flide Time, which tracks keystrokes and how long workers spend with their data labeling software open. Their bathroom breaks are also monitored.
Different Keystrokes
While spending too much time on clips can result in the HuMans program marking workers as having poor performance and ultimately end up on a performance improvement plan (PIP), it seems that Flide Time is the more nefarious of the two.
According to 17 workers who’d been subjected to the keystroke tracking software, workers have to log anywhere between five and seven-and-a-half hours minimum for their shifts. Six people who spoke to BI on condition of anonymity said that if they were even five minutes short of hitting their required Flide Time, they could face disciplinary action — and if it happened three times in six months, they would be fired.
In February 2023, as Bloomberg reported at the time, some Autopilot workers at the Buffalo facility tried to form a union, citing keystroke tracking software and “being treated like robots” as their reasoning.
Dozens of employees were laid off from the Buffalo Autopilot team that same month, and although the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint against Tesla for allegedly firing those workers for unionizing — which is illegal, though enforcement is only enacted after the fact via backpay — and in response, Tesla said that the workers had actually been fired for poor performance.
With new headlines cropping up all the time showing how poorly a job Tesla Autopilot actually does at piloting cars, it’s not surprising that the people tasked with building that system’s knowledge out are underpaid and heavily surveilled — or that when they tried to fight back against what they felt was unfair treatment, they were summarily cast aside.
More on Tesla’s alleged self-driving: If You Pay Attention to Tesla’s FSD Map on the Dashboard, Crucial Problems Quickly Appear
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