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• The Tesla Shanghai gigafactory is built like a castle - all four sides surrounded by rivers and woods and neatly hiding the factory itself from public sight.
• The front of the factory has a moat with four ”city gates” and bridges along Zhengjia Road (see photo).
• Three of the gates are officially in use where truck deliveries enter and exit the factory.
• Every entrance is manned by at least two security guards, who rigorously check every vehicle and personnel who approach the vicinity of the entrace.
• Employees have to park at parking lot next to Zhengjia Road with 24-hour security monitoring.
• Adjacent to the factory is a large piece of clearing (slightly larger than half of the factory size), possibly for future expansion.
• The Tesla battery factory under construction is across the river, and is built by Shanghai Baoye Group. The size of the battery factory is about 1/3 of the EV factory, has been under construction for half a year, and about half a month away from completion. You can see people working even late night at 1am.
• Accordingly, the construction workers once blocked the factory entrance to demand for wages, but was quashed by the local police.

2.1 ”Tesla Hostel”

An old residential area that has been converted into a “Tesla Hostel”. Infrastructure is quite complete. The housing are privately owned and rented out for employees who work nearby, most of which are single BR housing. Cleanliness is rather poor, no elevator. Rent is ~1000-1500 yuan. Many residents work for nearby factories at the Lin-gang Special Area e.g. Tesla, CIMC.

2.2 Lingang-Park Residential Area

Many Tesla employees live in this area, mostly 1BR 1BA apartments. Rent is ~1500-2000. No convenience store, courier station or restaurants nearby. ~1km from Tesla hostel, 6km from the factory.

2.3 Nichengzhen

~10km from the factory, a small but flourishing area, with complete infrastructure including large sized supermarkets. Living condition is relatively decent, rent ~1000-2000 yuan, which is quite cheap due to its further distance to the factory. According to the renting agency, most of the residents here work for Tesla. Public transportation to the Tesla factory is poor, with only one bus line (Lin-gang No 7 route), commute time is 54 minutes.

2.4 Areas around Pengping Highway covered by temp agency companies

Pengping Highway is ~5km from the factory. This area has an ”urban villages” style, with residential buildings resembling single-storey housing usually seen in provincial towns and villages. Area is quite small but has a concentration of at least 30 temp agency companies. Many shop lots operated by migrants (non locals) along the road. Many people eat breakfast here in the morning, including people who wear Tesla uniforms.

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2.5 Small wooded area

Adjacent to the Tesla gigafactory is a small wooded area with many stalls that serve the construction workers from the battery factory. Tesla factory workers also have their meals here.

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• Employees have to sign non-disclosure agreements, have very uniformed response towards external enquries.
• Internally the employees are not allowed to interact freely, the environment is highly atomized (employees can snitch on one another), and severe punishment can be dished out (fines, getting fired) against disobedience.
• Thus, the employees who remained are very tight lipped about the factory’s conditions, and are strongly defensive about Tesla.
• Why? Because the benefits and treatments are so much better than other factories: minimum entry level wage is 5300 yuan, decent welfare, very little overtime is needed (no more than 36 hours of overtime per month, normally 4 days of 12-hour work then 2 days off arrangement(上四休二)), average 12 rest days per month, and employees have the benefits of extra rest time for dog walking, fishing and other recreational activities.
• Accordingly, the first batch of employees also own some shares, and the overall treatment towards employee is very difficult to be matched by smaller scaled factories, whose employees have to work at least twice as hard to get the similar range of salary as Tesla’s. Including quarterly bonus, an average Tesla employee earns ~10k per month.
• In both administration and production departments, very few of those hired are female workers, most of whom were hired for the sales department. Most female employees are hired through campus recruitment. Is this gender discrimination? the reporter asked.
• Temp agencies know very little about Tesla itself, and most of them provide hiring services for companies who work upstream of Tesla’s supply chain.