Tesla plans to sell trucks: big semis, pickups, too

[politicat]

12. You're thinking of Tesla as a car company. It's not.

It's a technology company that produces devices that run on large-scale battery technology, starting with personal transport and solar home energy banking.

As for the labor issues -- it'll happen or it won't. Having watched UAW behave badly in the Rust Belt for the past 40 years, I'm not sure I'd want to be repped by UAW anyway. Tesla is coming out of the tech industry far more than the automotive industry, and the *unions* never wanted to rep tech.

Back in the early 90s, there were multiple attempts to organize tech, at Intel and Motorola (I was at Motorola then, and was involved in trying to get representation), at SGI and Cisco, and at Oracle and (I think) Microsoft. Even though the employees were being paid relatively well, and most of tech was relatively progressive in terms of benefits, most of the companies had deeply ugly sides. We were experiencing workplace abuse -- 100 hour work weeks on $45K annual salaries ($75K in 2017 money) and pay shenanigans (stock options! Vanishing 401k contributions!) and sexual harassment that makes Uber look like a model of moral integrity. None of the unions wanted to work with us; even CWA only wanted the ones doing telecom work. There's a reason that tech has been ambivalent to hostile towards unionization, and it's not because of the libertarian techie myth. It's because a lot of us early internet founders tried and the unions told us to go pound sand.