A former Tesla factory supervisor learned Friday he was losing his job — then was told he would not receive some bonus payments tied to his hiring and performance.
That’s according to the man’s wife, who tweeted out his story. Her husband declined to be interviewed.
“I’m shocked with how they treated him and how they refused to give him his 2018 performance bonus and the rest of his sign-on bonus,” Kari Pollock said of her husband, Dan Pollock.
Last week, Tesla announced it would cut 7 percent of its workforce, with CEO Elon Musk saying the firm faced an “extremely difficult challenge” in becoming competitive in an industry largely powered by fossil fuels.
All Tesla employees receive sign-on bonuses in company equity, and they may receive performance bonuses in equity or cash, according to the company. Both types of bonuses are given out on a schedule, with quarterly payments starting after a year of employment and continuing for four years. Tesla told Dan Pollock on Friday he would not receive the remainder of his sign-on bonus and his entire 2018 bonus, with the firm’s human resources office later clarifying that he would receive one of 48 payments from the 2018 bonus, Kari Pollock said.
The couple consider the entire bonuses to be already earned, and Tesla’s decision has thrown them into hardship, she said. They’re broke, and worried about paying their rent.
“We have no savings,” she said. “The financial situation is very serious.”
However, technology industry analyst Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies in San Jose said tech firms and other companies commonly pay bonuses periodically on a schedule, and laid-off workers may lose payments they would have received had they remained employed.
“It is relatively normal but each company does things differently,” Bajarin said. “The bottom line on that one is going to be how well that was spelled out in the original Tesla agreement that he signed.”
The couple, who share a 15-year-old Hyundai, pay $2,800 a month to live in a small two-bedroom apartment in Fremont with their son, 16, Kari Pollock said. Their former home in New York is for sale, but the market is stagnant and they’re still paying a mortgage on it. “We could lose the house,” she said.
They’re still deciding what to do about Tesla’s offer of a severance package that would provide two months’ salary but carry other consequences they’re still trying to understand, she said.
A Tesla spokesperson said the company had contacted Dan Pollock over the weekend to clarify the bonus-payment process.
“When someone leaves the company, voluntarily or involuntarily, they do not receive equity that has not yet vested,” Tesla said in a statement to this news organization. “This is common across companies and industries where equity is provided to employees and is not in any way unique to Tesla.”
The company said like other impacted Tesla employees at the Fremont factory, Dan Pollock will receive full pay and benefits for 60 days, plus his next quarterly equity award, which was scheduled to vest on March 5.
Tesla recruited Pollock, an Air Force veteran, from a position in New York as a production supervisor for a pharmaceutical company, his wife said. He started at Tesla in the spring of 2017. “We just thought this was an amazing opportunity,” she said. “I was proud of him and the whole family was proud of him. We bought Tesla merch for the kids for Christmas.”
After Kari Pollock went public Sunday on Twitter about the bonuses, commenters described her and her husband as naive, she said. “We were living in upstate New York and he was working for a company that doesn’t behave like (Tesla),” she said. “We just didn’t know. We’re not from the Silicon Valley and we just didn’t realize there was predatory behavior.”
San Jose employment lawyer Jackie Ford said many companies treat bonus payments differently for laid-off workers compared to those who quit, but that it’s also common for contract language to specify that bonus payments are only made to current employees. Ford noted the layoffs Musk announced Jan. 18.
“If I were looking at taking someone’s case I would want to know who got laid off, if it was a disproportionate number of people that were coming up for a portion of their sign-up bonus or a portion of their performance bonus,” Ford said.
Tesla said it spends considerable time educating new employees about how equity awards work, and runs in-person and recorded video-conferences twice a year about performance awards. The firm makes available to workers equity guides, FAQs and calculating functions to help them understand the equity arrangements, and recruiting and HR teams can answer employees’ questions about job-offer letters and equity, before, during or after the job-offer period, the company added.
When she opened up about the issue on Twitter, Kari Pollock said she and her husband had believed in Tesla’s mission.
“We were understanding about Tesla only giving bonuses broken down in payments over 4 years,” she tweeted. “Never, ever did it occur to us that they’d just ‘cancel’ all our money and throw my husband away like he did something wrong.”
