Tesla to Meet Police Over Continuing to Run Plant Despite Order
Tesla Vows to Take Plant Workers’ Temperatures, Hand Out Masks
(Bloomberg) -- Tesla Inc. will meet with local police and city managers Thursday about the carmaker continuing to run its lone U.S. auto plant in spite of a county shelter-in-place order.
“Police Chief Kimberly Petersen and members of our city management team will meet with Tesla factory management today to discuss cooperation for compliance with the county health officer’s order,” the Fremont, California police department said in a Twitter post.
Tesla handed out masks and took workers’ temperatures before they entered the factory Thursday. The company also is adding more hygiene stations and rearranging parts of the plant to promote social distancing, Valerie Workman, the carmaker’s head of human resources for North America, wrote in an internal email late Wednesday. She said the company continues to hold discussions with government officials about making Tesla’s workspace safe while also continuing to run an operation Tesla deems critical to national infrastructure.
The meeting with police is the latest twist in a standoff between Tesla and local authorities who have been trying to contain the spread of coronavirus. The county sheriff’s office has disputed the company’s view that it’s an essential business. A spokesman for the sheriff said Wednesday that the carmaker was preparing to reduce staffing at the facility to about 2,500 from roughly 10,000.
Workman wrote in the email that there have been no layoffs and suggested news reports about the company has been inaccurate.
Elon Musk, the chief executive officer of both Tesla and SpaceX, has sent a series of tweets casting doubt on the severity of Covid-19. While he took after General Motors Co.’s CEO by saying Wednesday that his companies may make ventilators, he also suggested it’s unclear there’s a shortage of them.
In a separate tweet, he repeated his view that panic over the virus will do more harm than the illness itself.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio on Thursday told Musk the country faced a “drastic shortage” of ventilators and said the city would need thousands over the next few weeks. Musk followed up:
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