Safety incidents at Tesla plant were higher than industry average in 2015
latimes.com
latimes.com
For the record, in 2016, the injury rate per 1000 workers for "automobile manufacturing" as a whole was 6.7; "Animal (except poultry) slaughtering" was 7.2; "Sawmills" 7.3; Tesla's was 8.1, on a level with "psychiatric and substance abuse hospitals", just above "heavy and civil engineering construction", and just below "correctional institutions", to name a few. Tesla claims they're down to 4.6 in 1st quarter 2017, but of course we only have their word for that.
The document further breaks out cases with days away from work, restrictions, or transfers (DART). That's 3.9 for the auto industry in general, 4.9 for non-poultry slaughtering, 3.9 for sawmills, and 7.3 for Tesla (from the WorkSafe report linked in the article).
So it sounds like there may actually be something to this. Weird that they decided to go with clickbait instead of just presenting the data.
Not to say that any harm to your health should be avoided, but by auto industry standards (other than Tesla) to this day serious incidents involve losing limbs or death. I know they're pushing everyone at Tesla as the company is still losing a lot amount of money, but it's not clear that anyone being pushed is taking really serious risks -- at other auto companies, they are and the result is literally loss of limb and life. Moreover their loss is for "greedy capitalists" as the workers earn very little, have incentives to take risks, are not trained appropriately, and traditional car companies are quite profitable unlike Tesla.
The photos in the recent Businessweek coverage of auto industry safety of people missing limbs are horrible (Tesla was not mentioned therein btw).
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-03-23/inside-al...
Just an interesting thing.
Comparing the safety history of a company that has produced fewer than 200,000 vehicles ever to companies that produce many multiples of that, annually, and have been in operation for over a hundred years is ridiculous.
Man, if you can brand yourself a "tech company" the Silicon Valley technorati will apologize for anything.
1- "worse than slaughterhouses and sawmills" is more catchy than "better than X" (chose any X automaker) 2- Is the safety level of a slaughterhouses or a sawmill comparable to a car's ? They are things not in the same category, with different sophistication level and different purpose, how many times a day an average person will enter a slaughterhouse or a sawmill ?
Have you ever entered a sawmill? Don't get me started.
So, if Tesla is a higher injury place than a sawmill, somebody shoduld send inspections and audit the place thoroughly.
It would make more sense to compare to the most simmilar companies.
It's analagous to saying "Elon Musk's mouth has worse bacterial contamination than petri dish of Lyme Disease." Sure, by number of bacterial agents, Musk's mouth is more contaminated... But that's not a very useful statement unless you want to mislead people.
Machinery doesn't kill people every day at Tesla nor at sawmills but considering the differences between the workplaces it's impressive that the number of little injuries at an auto manufacturer adds up to the number of little injuries in a sawmill.
All: let's please have a more substantive discussion now. It's amazing how sensitive these threads are to hot coals in the title.
[0]: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=linear+regression+of+%5... [1]: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=linear+regression+of+%5...
Compare that with the slaughterhouse industry:
"In recent years, the industry has bragged about dramatic reductions in worker injuries. What they’ve failed to report is that the OSHA injury form was recently re-written to omit the category of repetitive stress injuries – the most commonly reported injury in the industry."
http://www.foodispower.org/slaughterhouse-workers/
So, Tesla is being compared on reported injury rates to slaughterhouses, whose standards have been re-written to exclude reporting the most common types of injuries, which just-so-happen to be the types Tesla is reporting?
(Note that the quote above comes from a pro-vegan site, so it isn't unbiased).
NPR similarly describes widespread under-reporting of injuries in the meat processing industry: http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/05/25/479509221/we-...
I'm inclined to give Tesla the benefit of the doubt here, though we should not minimize the effects of repetitive stress disorders.
> we now have the lowest injury rate in the industry by far
This article seems to be misleading readers into thinking that Tesla has unsafe working conditions, despite being the best in the industry.
So no, it doesn’t answer the question. It could be that slaughterhouses and sawmills are really safe—say 3 on a 1-10 scale—while automakers are 6 and Tesla is 8.
The article says Tesla has a worse safety record than slaughterhouses and sawmills.
Accordingly, other automakers may still be more dangerous than slaughterhouses and sawmills, while being less dangerous than Tesla.
Without the 31% higher, you'd expect a 50-50 chance of being above or below the average. 31% higher sounds like its might be statistically significant. You'd need other numbers to be sure - e.g. if there are only 1.53 incidents on average, then Tesla might be the unlucky factory that had 2 incidents instead of 1.
Who cares? The very definition of "industry average" means that someone in the industry will be above or below the average. Why would I want to read about that? Why pick on Tesla? because they're popular?
To answer your last question, because two weeks ago Tesla said the opposite: https://www.tesla.com/blog/creating-the-safest-car-factory-i...
So, if history is any indicator, Tesla should shut its trap until it has a full year, after revisions, that show it's genuinely superior. Oh, I made myself laugh.
Here in the future, past trends are irrelevant.
People seem to think it matters when they claim Tesla is "above average" in autonomous driving capability, or automated car manufacturing.
But yeah, "who cares" about people getting hurt in blue-collar industries, am I right?
12-16 hrs a day?
Also, yes, poor people work 12-16 hours a day. It was certainly the case when I worked at a grocery store years ago, at least.
Or was he making tons of money because of overtime so didn't care until it became a critical health problem?
Sounds like both the employee and the employer were falling down on the job of ensuring safe working practices. Not to mention lax regulation.
> Alan Ochoa said long hours repeating the same moves over and over with a drill caused enough hand pain to prevent him from working. He was given an office job but said carpal tunnel injuries prevented him from typing on his laptop.
> Tesla has made improvements, he said. “But why did they change? They changed because of its union efforts.”
Must do better.
Edit - I know safety is a serious matter, but it does look like this is a historical issue that Tesla takes seriously and has under control.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/18/tesla-wor...
And all with very click-baity negative headlines and articles that don't exactly seem like neutral reporting of an issue.
I'd bet that there is some PR firm trying to drum up anti Tesla sentiments.
(I'm not saying that there wasn't or isn't an issue at Tesla factories, but the kind of reporting stinks like PR campaign).
Anything anti-Tesla is part of some PR conspiracy. Meanwhile, 10 vapid, fluff-pieces from Electrek or random Musk tweets show up on the front page every week.
Have you considered that, perhaps, it's not all rainbows and unicorns with this company?
> (I'm not saying that there wasn't or isn't an issue at Tesla factories)
OMG
"The scores don’t account for severity however.”
Oh...
Anyone reckon there would be a surprising number in this ratio? (i.e. is their automation level higher than the traditional car makers?)
Maybe you believe Elon when he says that it's worth it, but there's no arguing that it's a steep price to pay.
It's incredibly frustrating that no one has figured out a way to bring about the kind of transformative change that Tesla is after without such back breaking sacrifice. But I think the fact remains there's too much non-linearity in the means of production to get where Elon is trying to go without pushing his people to the limit.
The only "answer" I can give is just that I hope TSLA employees are getting enough equity to make it all worth it.
What is the basis for that? It is an easy rationalization for an issue with serious consequences.
Or to put it another way, when Jeff Dean pulls an all nighter and commits code at 6am before collapsing under his desk for a few moments rest, for the rest of the day, all of Google is twice as productive.
(Also, back when I was still pulling all-nighters, I could do 3-5 days worth of work in a night, but I'd be largely useless for the rest of the week, so it was a wash at best. Good for catching up before a deadline, but not really a strong strategy overall.)
It's a poor way to compare a company's safety record.
It isn't the equivalent of a startup employee working through the holidays to ship code. The benefits of workplace ergonomics, not only to employee health but also to production speed, have been known for decades. Tesla doesn't have to reinvent the wheel here.
It's no justification, but IMO you simply can't get where Elon is trying to go without that level of sacrifice from the people carrying the load.
Tesla apparently made a lot of basic mistakes in designing their initial production line, as you say, basic ergonomic failures. Now what we hear as they scale up for Model 3 is that it's people building machines that build cars. If there's a human actually on the Model 3 "line" then by definition it won't run fast enough. My own experience is that automation is asymptotic in that it takes orders of magnitudes more engineering to achieve progressively more "complete" automation. Not everything will be automated, and the whole line will run so hard that the parts which aren't will be absolutely brutal to keep up with. But I have absolutely zero evidence for this, it's just a hunch.
I agree but I think that scenario can also be pretty exploitative.
Learning from mistakes is one of the key traits of successful people and companies.
Elon himself has said, to stay alive they have had to push harder than imaginable. He tries to put himself in the center of it -- work the longest hours, face the worst of the conditions. Which is admirable but still a glaring symptom.
Elon is the king at the head of the charge. But it's still a bloody charge all the same.
But Tesla? A goddamn car company? What the hell is so important about fancy cars for rich people that they have to screw the workers for?
Sure, they call themselves an "energy company", and they have made "amazing advances in energy technology", but both Tesla's fancy solar panel AND battery "advances" are literally just licensed Panasonic tech.
I don't get it.
Long term they will also be more ecological to keep and maintain: They are simpler machines that break much less, and batteries are pretty much the only thing that will need replacement, which will eventually be 100% recycled using renewable energy.
What's so steep about it? It's marginally higher than the industry average. Some other members of industry will be higher than that average as well. The numbers in the article don't paint the picture of Tesla being a charnel house compared against its contemporaries.
Waif: You can't treat the working man this way! One of these days we'll form a union, and get the fair and equitable treatment we deserve! Then we'll go too far, and become corrupt and shiftless, and the Japanese will eat us alive!
They are also responsible for making sure that government grants flow into OEMs instead of generic EV charging infrastructure.
We regularly have reengineering projects for end-of-line testing equipment and other test benches where we are contractually required to guarantee that the new version does not make the personnel operating the equipment redundant (i.e. it may not be more efficient than the 15 year old version). (I won't blame anyone for disbelieving this.)
So, yes, they are very much against manufacturing improvements.
A union that faces no competition becomes sclerotic just like a monopoly company.