Probably the biggest takeaway is, in jurisdictions that permit it, "record all your conversations at work, encrypt them, and hope you never need them."

She would be in a totally different situation if she had a tape of Tesla's AGC threatening her friends through their immigration status. That is straight up mafia tactics.

Brings to mind this case [1].

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-29388019

That presumes you're in a legal jurisdiction where one-party consent is allowed for recording conversations doesn't it? Otherwise it would be inadmissible.

Yep. Based on the article, it sounds like the criminal act that Tesla is accusing her of is unlawful recording.

It's a solid point, and I've updated my comment accordingly.

Inadmissible in court, but you can always leak to the press and see what happens.

At the risk of attracting more downvotes, I persist. The problem with corporate malfeasance and bullying, of which Elon Musk seems to be a specialist, is that people are afraid to retaliate.

We shouldn't be afraid.

I personally sued big corporations, as an individual, two times, and won. Granted, this was in Europe, not the US, but the warnings and hand-waving of people telling me one should never do that were similar.

If you care enough about the issue, and don't care much about the risks, which are usually wildly exaggerated, the odds are actually in your favor.

The point here was specifically about secretly recording converations in a jurisdiction where that is illegal. If you'd tried to use recordings like that in your two suits against big coporations, they would have been thrown out by the judge and you would have put yourself at risk of criminal prosecution into the bargain.

Not only inadmissible, but can incur criminal liability as well, such as in California.

With criminal statutes, it significantly raises the bar about how to "leak" something to the press, the press who needs to verify the source and can be subpoena'd for records.

It's actually a bit backwards.

A private person recording someone illegally is a crime. In some circumstances (for instance to prove a witness in lying), it can still be admissable. [ref https://www.stimmel-law.com/en/articles/secret-recording-con....]

Now is it is worth admitting to a crime that can carry fines of up to $2,500 and/or imprisonment for up to a year (misdemeanor) is a hefty question. In addition, the violator may be subject to civil liability in the amount of $5,000 or three times the amount of any actual damages sustained as a result.

If this was a lawsuit due to serious, career ending malfeasance against you, where a key witness would be trivially proven a liar and you could end up with millions in a settlement? Maybe? Could they turn around and sue you for 3x the settlement? Sounds like you'd want to talk to a lawyer first.

Not happening most of the time though.

This advice to record things can be dangerous. Laws vary from state to state. Recording someone secretly could be a felony.

The article suggests that unlawful recording is the criminal act that Tesla is alleging she committed.

The article suggests she was fired because she asked for a meeting with Musk about floor mats after failing to get the proper response from the regular chain of command. In my experience, everywhere I worked had a chain of command and consistently stepping outside the chain of command and going over your managers heads rarely leads to good results.

From an article mentioned in the LA Times article

> She considered leaving Tesla, but fellow engineers convinced her to stay. “I promised them I [would] get to Elon one way or the other,” she wrote, “even if I [had to go] to the Supreme Court.”

I would understand from a corporate perspective Tesla wanting to remove this person. A company, especially one on the brink of bankruptcy as Tesla was in 2014 has to have a high degree of cohesion and minimal dissent from employees.

> Instead, Balan said, she was forced to resign, an event that launched a six-year legal journey leading to where she is today: about to face off against Tesla — on her own, without an attorney — in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

I can't understand how someone can be let go from a company and make it their life's work over the next 6 years to grieve and fight publicly. Right or wrong, it seems like an utterly destructive process on the personal level.

> Balan says her professional reputation suffered damage so severe she can’t find a company willing to hire her. “They tell me, ‘We’d like to hire you, but we can’t afford to be on Musk’s blacklist,’” she said.

Employers aversion to hiring Balan may have to do with her lawsuit, at least a little bit

> The article suggests she was fired because she asked for a meeting with Musk about floor mats after failing to get the proper response from the regular chain of command. In my experience, everywhere I worked had a chain of command and consistently stepping outside the chain of command and going over your managers heads rarely leads to good results.

Tesla's PR claims that it's a non-traditional, innovative company, where if someone finds a serious problem that can't be resolved by the chain of command, they should e-mail Musk.

The reality of course, bears little resemblance to the myth.

Did you miss the part where Musk announced that employees are to disregard hierarchy and go directly up the chain if it solves problems faster, including all the way to the top?

Weeks earlier, in a companywide email, Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk had dumped on the concept of corporate hierarchy. Find “the fastest way to solve a problem to the benefit of the whole company” and don’t worry about your boss, he told them. Go straight to the top, if need be. Balan took him up on it.

Typical CEO double speak. Senior management at my company says similar things. Then if you look at the HR policy you find the fine print that greatly restricts what was said.

I had a department head tell us his door is always open and to contact him about stuff (company policy supports the open door policy). I took him up on it. When I showed up, he had another manager there in addition to himself (it was supposed to be a scheduled meeting with just me and him). I was later rated poorly, both in an interview and at year end, for a lack of leadership (following the hierarchy).

To give you an executive's perspective on this one: I'm saying the same to my employees (and I mean it). But there are two types of ways this happens in reality:

Case 1: An actual smart and caring employee bypasses the chain to give me evidence of a manager not acting in the companys interest. Usually that's not the first indication of such a thing and listening around reaffirms the conclusion quickly. The manager is approached as quickly as possible and since at this paygrade it's in no-one's best interest to burn bridges, they suddenly decide to spend more time with their family, a sweet severance package changes hands, employees are happy again and you don't read about this in the news. It's exactly why I said this in the first place (and meant it).

Case 2: An employee with issues not bringing the company further (usually one or more of paranoia, toxicity, not-seeing-the-big-picture, searching for problems instead of solutions or emotional health issues) bypasses the chain of command with "evidence", but listening around almost nobody shares this employees' opinion. You fire them. Suddenly all problems disappear, employees are happy and then you read about this in the news, because the only person left unhappy did really not get the memo.

Judging from the type of problems here (something something starship about floor mats at a time when Model 3 just wasn't ramping up production and cashflow almost ruined the company), I do have my opinion about the type of "privilege escalation" in this case but I obviously won't share it.

My specific instance was that I was the application security champion for a critical application application that had a SQL injection vulnerability (with full schema owner privileges!), but lower-level management wasn't making it a priority and didn't even assign any resources to remediate the issue. So I went to explain the issue to the department head because he was the owner of the application. As an ASC I answer to, and represent, the security division so I can talk to the owners of apps that I support regardless of the hierarchy. I think he didn't understand that dynamic, as I typically see managers breaking company policy and not caring (I'm smart enough to keep my mouth shut on those issues). I didn't go to complain. I went to explain the problem and give him options and my recommendation.

He told me that we have a real-time backup system so he didn't think it was worth fixing. I then asked if we ever ran tests of that system and if we had documentation on how to restore from it. We don't. This is for financial trading application handling billions of dollars. Being down for even a few hours could be catastrophic.

The big man spoke. I don't agree with the outcome, but I'm not the boss. So that was the end of it (except for in discussions like this on here). I left for another team because there's no way I'm going to be the security champion for a system with that level of risk. And thank God you weren't my manager or I would have been fired under your #2 scenario.

On a side note, just because a small number of people are complaining doesn't mean their opinions are invalid. Minorities are often disenfranchised due to this thinking. Also, managers may not know all the policies for the company and may be violating them.

For a real life example combining these, company policy states that a person be evaluated against the standard and recieve a rating that way. Some departments mandate that if a manager pick a higher than average rating for someone, then they must pick someone else to balance it out with a lower rating. This would only affect 10% of the population and the number unjustly affected would be lower than that. So the other 90% recieved good rating, so why would they complain? The objective way I know that I was unjustly rated was because I had a manager friend who told me what happened in the meeting and said it was wrong.

Reading your description seems like it was squarely in the GPs Case #1, not Case #2.

#1 implies the firing of a bad manager, which didn't happen. It also requires others in the group to back me up (as a security concern very few people knew).

#2 seemed more fitting since no action was taken. And it resulted in me leaving that area of the company (voluntarily thankfully).

Most cases, sure. But did you see the evidence in the article about her reputation at work? She was quite obviously an appreciated employee all around.

You may be right, this case looks less than clear.

I'm mostly playing devils' advocate here, as newspapers, lawyers and shortsellers usually have their own axe to grind and are continually searching for good David against Goliath stories.

Just dropping in that having a toxic effect on the company and being respected / appreciated by peers are absolutely not mutually exclusive. Often times they rather go hand in hand and you've got such people rallying up others over non-issues (in the big picture of things). As others already said in the comments, cohesion and alignment are far more important to a high risk / high growth company than "solving all the problems".

If you are an executive, are you really playing devil's advocate?

Reminds me of the old Dilbert cartoon where the boss tells his employees to do something, then grabs the binoculars thinking "This will be the easiest round of layoffs ever" [1]. Sometimes, suggestions from upper management that employees should let their guard down and do something they normally wouldn't are just clever tactics to encourage "undesirables" to out themselves.

1: https://dilbert.com/strip/2000-08-18

Except when it's not. Often being cynical will give you accurate expectations, but sometimes not being cynical pays off.

https://thehustle.co/hot-cheetos-inventor/

> In the video, Enrico encouraged every worker at the company to “act like an owner.” Most employees brushed it off as a management cliché; Montañez took it to heart.

> “Here’s my invitation… here’s the CEO telling me, the janitor, that I can act like an owner,” he later recalled. “I didn’t know what I was going to do. Didn’t need to. But I knew I was going to act like an owner.”

(Predictably, his manager was pissed.)

Most CEOs and senior managers say this. This isn't carte blanche to undermine your superiors or break protocol.

I'm sure there's more to the story.

Very true. I unwisely chose an employer and my life has been increasingly harsh and lately scary, and the snowball of problems grows and rolls down the hill. OpenTable, don’t work or them.

>Only defense against it is to be as careful choosing your employer as possible.

That's not the only defense, this is example #25360432 showing how necessary labor unions are.

Unions can be useful for industry specific protections or benefits. This would provide different protections specific to a type of work.

I think arbitration protections and restrictions on employment contracts to preserve employee rights should be handled through legislation since it should be universally applicable to all workers. This would remove the variance in protections from one union to another.

Legislation would be ideal, but in the absence of such legislation (such as the bill mentioned in the article to limit mandatory arbitration that was attempted in 2019 and passed the House but was never voted on in the Senate) unions still might be the best option in the short term.

Maybe. Unions can become corrupt or politically influenced too. In fact, organized labor is one of the main money makers for organized crime. I'm not saying all unions are bad, just that some can be. Just as any power structure like governments or company management can be too.

I wonder if the major unions have banned together to get that bill introduced and voted on? It could be possible that they wouldn't support legislation like that because more legislative protections can make the union seem less useful.

If the unions don't have incentive to push the bill and more workers are covered by unions and don't see the benefit of the bill because they are already protected, then could that delay or even prevent the passage of those protections? It may end up as a long term fix that leaves non-uninonized groups and groups that seem unlikely to organize, like IT. Of course with widespread existing adoption, a counter point could be less opposition to it.

I suspect the reason it didn't pass the Senate is that Republicans are in the majority there, and I can't imagine any union having much influence or leverage with Mitch McConnell to even convince him to hold a vote.

Good luck getting suitable legislation through parliament without power. Power listens only to power.

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The GP comment stepped a foot over that line but this is crashing right through it. Please don't. We're trying for curious conversation here, not repetitive bashing.

I’ll attempt to “not flamewar” but you are being rather sensitive about this. A decent moderation is necessary but i fail to see any reason for the watchdogs to hate on my post.

Fact is Chicago is very much underwater because unions have gripped the city’s pension to the point that they cannot pass meaningful budget resolutions.

Unions had a place at the beginning of the industrial age for worker safety and reasonable wages. With OSHA and a long list of other laws, unions are largely outdated.

Please contribute something useful and not rules that are hardly being bent otherwise you are cluttering “curious conversations.”

It was a cliché one-liner on a divisive theme that was far off topic. That certainly counts as flamebait. This is not a borderline call!

Sometimes people make a more substantive comment in response to a moderation scolding—sort of explaining the background that was in their mind but which they didn't say earlier. I'd say your second and third paragraphs here count as that. If you had included that in your original post, it would at least have been not a one-liner and less of a cliché, and I probably wouldn't have replied.

Only the biggest, nastiest unions were able to survive the purge.

The claim that unions are horrible may be true for some large, high profile unions, but what everyone seems to ignore are all the small, totally unknown unions that get shit done.

A good rule of thumb: if the union is so large that it has enough bureaucrats that they have their own Union, then it's likely most of your dues are spent on propagating the Union bureaucracy and not necessarily on aiding the employees the Union represents.

> Chicago is a great example of labor unions and how well they work out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy

Chicago ain't the world! Here, in Germany, labor unions are not perfect either, but pretty effective. It's a question of culture: if something never can grow up, into a solid state, it will cease to succeed. In the US unions get constantly hated and attacked. It's difficult to develop a healthy personality under such circumstances.

I loooove me some fallacies and biases. I work diligently everyday at work to avoid them.

However; I think this is misplaced as a quick search of Chicago news will inform the reader that Ms. Lightfoot has her hands full trying to balance a budget while not crippling the city because of unions. There is no fallacy here, only truth that is uncomfortable to some.

> There is no fallacy here, only truth that is uncomfortable to some.

There is, though. And it is an association fallacy.

You wrote:

> Chicago is a great example of labor unions and how well they work out.

The error in your logic:

Premise: Chicago's labor unions are labor unions.

Premise: Chicago's labor unions are bad.

Your conclusion: Therefore, all labor unions are bad.

What the hell do you people think Chicago is? It's not 1929 anymore.

4 of the last 10 Governors of Illinois have gone to prison.

That's funny, because your chosen statistic requires you to go back to 1961.

Illinois had a governor arrested while in Office just 12 years ago for corruption. They've had it repeatedly over the last 60 years. Seems like a trend, and not just limited to 1929.

The governor of Missouri was indicted in that same time frame, and the governor of Alabama convicted.

And?

You're right I mean the teamsters union is such an upstanding example of the positive effects of unions.

What are some other examples of how well they work out? Paid holiday? Days off? Working environments that weren't deathtraps? Sounds pretty good to me.

You don’t have those in your non-union job? Everyone I know in tech already gets paid time off, and safe work environments.

Of course I do. Don't be a childish, passive-aggressive dickhead [0]. You know as well as everyone else here that these were fought for and won by unions.

[0] I make no apology. I really don't like that kind of phony bullshit pretend question. Its dishonesty is corrosive to discourse.

That seems like an inappropriate overreaction. Also, no, they were not. Companies who have never had unions offer these things, because we would not work there if they didn’t.

Even if they were, the fact that they are ubiquitous today without unions would mean that this is historical trivia, and not an argument that supports having a union today.