Canoo Imposes 'Mandatory Unpaid Leave' On All Employees, Locking Workers Out Of Systems Until 2025
Good morning! It’s Monday, December 26, 2024, and this is The Morning Shift , your daily roundup of the top automotive headlines from around the world, in one place. Here are the important stories you need to know.
As we all know, building cars is hard , but the self-driving vehicle manufacturer Canoo suffers from more self-inflicted problems than most. Earlier this year, it was revealed that the company spent twice as much on a private jet for its CEO than it had earned for the entire year of 2023. It burned through capital and now seems unable to wrap up the year.
It’s been a tough year full of bad decisions for the automaker. Canoo previously furloughed 23 percent of its employees back in November and now, just a month later, its remaining workers received word on December 18 that they were going on the worst kind of vacation; a mandatory unpaid one until at least the start of the new year, CarScoops reports. And to make sure they don’t do any work, Canoo locked them out of its various software and systems.
Canoo was supposed to bring automotive manufacturing back to the state of Oklahoma, and the company received taxpayer-funded, performance-based incentives totaling $100 million spaced out over 10 years to do exactly that. But the way things are going right now, it’s questionable whether Canoo will last long enough to bring those promised steady jobs to the Sooner State.
