Tesla will end up hiring around 54% more workers for the Gigafactory project than was initially supposed, according to Nevada’s executive director of the Governor’s Office of Economic Development.
Steve Jurvetson, JB Straubel, and other members of the Tesla board on top of Gigafactory 1 — March 2015.
Initial estimates were that 6,500 jobs would be created by the Gigafactory project. Now, the forecast is that more than 10,000 jobs will be created by the project.
“When we originally presented the project to Legislature in 2014, we projected 6,500 jobs on site,” Hill commented, at a joint meeting of the Assembly Committee on Taxation and the Senate Committee on Revenue and Economic Development in Carson City. “The efficiency that’s being created from a functional standpoint at the facility is actually enabling more employees to be employed on the site.”
Here’s a breakdown of the current job situation at the Gigafactory project (via Teslarati):
- The factory now has almost 1,000 permanent employees.
90% of these permanent employees are home-grown citizens of Nevada. - 2,500 additional construction workers are on site.
- 60% of those construction workers are from Nevada.
- The Gigafactory is already producing battery cells, power walls, and battery packs.
- A planned addition to the Gigafactory site is expected to create even more jobs.
- The Gigafactory will be 5 million square feet with 5 floors of manufacturing when complete.
- The Gigafactory will be the largest manufacturing facility in the world.
- More than 10,000 jobs are now forecast to come out of the Tesla plant.
Along with the comments mentioned above, Hill also discussed the reality that planned production efficiency gains were expected to support a much higher number of employees than was first estimated. As you may well recall, the initial plans were for the Gigafactory to support 35 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of battery production a year, but this estimate was increased to 50 GWh following efforts by company engineers to develop new production synergies at the massive plant.
“Mr Musk in their earnings call said that they felt they could produce battery capacity now for 1 million cars, and originally that was 500,000,” Hill continued. “So the employment prospects at the site continue to improve.”
It’s reported that Tesla currently employs around 30,000+ people in the US, but we haven’t seen any official statements on that and are reaching out to Tesla for a response.
Photo via Steve Jurvetson (CC BY 2.0 license)
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