Tesla workers report explosions, concussions and robot injuries at Texas factory
theverge.com
theverge.com
There is an entire book about this called The Machine that Changed the World, written in 1990.
It is about how American car builders, like General Motors, had this philosophy all through the 70s and 80s, to never stop the line because it slowed production, and ignore people making suggestings, just fix everything in rework (after the car is finished).
At the same time, Japanese automakers were adopting the philosophy of stopping the line when there are issues, in fact you are trained to do this, then root-causing the problem, fixing it, and listening to workers (and in fact, many engineers have to start out working on the line). Japanese makers improved quality and production efficiency at the same time, something Americans thought was contradiction in terms, and this is why the Japanese won in the 80s and 90s. Since then basically every single automaker that is still in business has adopted pieces of that philosophy.
I dont understand why Tesla seems to be thinking they can ignore 100+ years of knowledge and experience in manufacturing wisdom. I have seen ex-Tesla people on the internet even call factory workers "button pushers". This is not what factory workers are in a modern manufacturing system, everyone is part of a team whose goal is to eliminate waste and improve production process efficiency, the idea you can just let things spray metal everywhere and ignore people with solutions is mind boggling in 2023.
Because EVs are much simpler, and more specifically, Tesla's engineering philosophy is to simplify (and save money) where possible. They shave away features and use software to supplement where possible such that the final product can be easily and cheaply manufacturered. Of course the lack of emphasis on GD&T and traditional craftsmanship is exactly why their build quality is so shoddy. Functional yes, but shoddy.
Matsushita then became Panasonic which of course is still a major partner for Tesla.
I’m not sure how typical that is in the industry. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it’s totally normal.
During the worst periods of South African apartheid, the mining industry had it's own lingua franca which it taught all migrant workers coming into the deep mines.
But if you say they gave up and just used Africaans I can believe it.
He refused to recognise unions & collective bargaining for decades. He was a complete scumbag, personally as far as I'm concerned. But paying high, employing black workers and immigrants, and fixing housing isn't bad.
Can anyone familiar with OSHA/factory safety laws explain to me how a facility that reports 1/21 workers being injured in a single year isn't immediately shut down and fully investigated?
Is this a manipulation of reported data? Or does OSHA really have no teeth regarding this situation?
Guess what... the meatpacking plant in Iowa with 98% undocumented immigrants is not reporting all their injuries because they are threatening their workers with deportation.
This particular metric would indeed include a paper cut. A better metric is the number of injuries that required time off from work or reassignment of duties. That’s something that Tesla reports, but the article doesn’t include it.
OSHA tracks this and is a much more reliable source than a random article.
https://aa.law/blog/tesla-received-triple-the-amount-of-osha...
9 accidents, 4 incidents, 7 complaints. For 20 cases, 48 violations were issued. All in California, which may or may not have a subjective impact on how these cases are handled.
Yeah, I've worked places where if you got a papercut you had to report it to HR. They had a web portal for it. Had to do it in order to receive a band-aid once.
We were also strictly forbidden from having medical supplies on-prem. No advil, no bandaids, no nothing.
I'd assume those numbers are high because of a similar system in place there.
- "mega-bucks companies" don't care about federal, state, local laws. they only care about their corporate policy,
- "mega-bucks companies" typically have toothless safety managers, but they generally can't stop things after ops goes over their head, these safety managers+programs exist mostly as a front,
- corporations exist in order to insulate most employees (especially "managers") from personal responsibility from "bad things happening,"
- employees which are injured to anything past a minor extent are taken into a back room with HR, given the instruction of:
1] take a large payment (paid through the same channel as their paycheck)
2] never speak of the incident to anybody, EVER, including any co-workers, lawyers, and anybody else (although they can tell their spouse and their personal physicians),
3] must resign from their position (not always!), or they are terminated without cause (right-to-work state) as part of their backroom settlement,
33] maybe they forge retroactive "resigned/termed the day before" in order to get around the osha reporting (can't report an injury happening "today" about an employee who "quit yesterday" ha ha ha),
4] they have to give 90%+ of the money back if the employer can prove (in court) that the employee broke their bye-bye agreement.
edit more: of course this is all probably illegal, but they are giving the person just enough money to be sure they will not want to talk. MANY become injured as the goal, of getting this type of large lottery payment. some payments are 10x the pay of the entire year, and these are just poor people, they ALWAYS take the money.
so the employee that got blown up by the moulding machine probably got a huge backroom offer to claim they had resigned the day before the incident, or they were terminated without cause (right-to-work state), that's why there was nothing to report to osha in terms of personnel injuries.
oldest trick from the book. video footage is suddenly unavailable if it is too inconvenient for the HR narrative.
they do a similar with drug tests after you cause an accident: if you know you'll fail, you just clock out and go home. nobody asks because everybody knows. first thing the next day, they pull you in for the drug test that you're ready to pass.
that being said, most employees who get injured at work are usually high (edit: they're high most days, and then either high or not high in the moment they get injured)
sorry for my english but you gringos don't build anything anymore because it's too difficult to keep shit under wraps, unless it's a right-to-work state. in the old days of american making goods, people were injured all the time.
think I am bullshitting? go make some farmer friends, and make some mechanics friends, eventually you'll know friends-of-the-friends who have missing fingers, etc., and they laugh as they tell you the story. they laugh because they got paid to lie. they laugh because they were paid to never say they got paid. they laugh because the actual way they got hurt is too bad to say.
blood mist cloud.
one of you data freaks should plot the:
1] illegal immigration rate in right-to-work vs not states
2] the lack of osha reports in such right-to-work states compared to those same industries in the not states
- I bet you do not find the same amounts of industries in the not-right-to-work states!
3] overwhelming osha compliance in not-write-to-work states
you may find something interesting.
AI can not come soon enough for these business leaders, all of these get-hurt-on-purpose workers will be gone!!!
I think the only difference is, those who get hurt for the payment, and those who were just trying to do a good job and were hurt honest by the system.
Incredible. With stories like this it's amazing the whole place wasn't shutdown by regulators until management can demonstrate competence.
From the beginning, the appeal of Texas for Elon has been lower regulatory oversight.
> OSHA inspected this incident and fined the contractors.
If you hire someone to do work at your place of business (or home), and they fail to take the necessary precautions, why would you be held responsible?
The best is seeing the guy on the jackhammer with his ppe hanging around his neck.
It’s like a cultural thing. Most guys in construction don’t seem to care at all. And osha has very little influence. Think of the number of workplaces, factories, and construction sites around the country compared to how many inspectors there are…
This seems like pretty boring, dumb factory stuff. Even if you have a safety auditor, he can't keep someone from removing PPE when it's too hot out or what have you.
I've given my guys PPE, only to come back an hour later, respirator off, working with paint, insulation, you name it. They only put it on "when the boss is around" and sometimes not even then.
https://facilityexecutive.com/calosha-cites-disney-construct...
They don't have the ability to shut down entire facilities and they don't have the resources to conduct proactive inspections to correct problems before people are hurt/killed.
So the Democrats as well.
No, OSHA doesn't have the resources to be proactive. I wish it did. How would you prevent it from being gamed? Anyway, employees can be proactive too and that doesn't require OSHA to be proactive -- it requires OSHA to (also) be reactive.
If someone is concerned over workplace safety then they should put their concern into words. Talk with your employer about your concerns. It's easiest if you write down your words anyway, but doing so is required by OSHA: if you aren't satisfied by the solution that your employer offers then you can take the same words to OSHA. It's worth noting that some states (I'm not sure which) have their own implementation of OSHA.
In the USA, any employee can, and should be encouraged to, report [0] unsafe conditions before something bad happens. OSHA has an obligation to investigate if any one of several criteria [1] are true, but one of which is:
> A written, signed complaint by a current employee or employee representative with enough detail to enable OSHA to determine that a violation or danger likely exists that threatens physical harm or that an imminent danger exists;
Your employer will almost certainly want to have resolved your safety concerns. Writing it down when talking to your employer can help with eloquence and finding necessary details. And if you're fired for discussing the concerns with your employer then there's a safety harness for you:
> Federal law entitles you to a safe workplace. Your employer must keep your workplace free of known health and safety hazards. You have the right to speak up about hazards without fear of retaliation.
[0]: https://www.osha.gov/workers/file-complaint
Many employers simply do not care about worker safety. They'll claim to but the pressures they put in place ensure that it's treated as a secondary measure at best.
Most employees cannot afford to be fired for speaking up about safety. Legal protections and compensation often take months/years to come through. They are useless when you have no money for next month's rent.
Not to mention that in many places the company that fired you is often the only major employer in your area.
You do not owe courtesy to employer that's putting your life at risk. Its their job to know the law. Tell them nothing, give them no reason to supect you spoke to OSHA, and go straight to reporting.
The reality for most people, is that there will be retaliation and the law will not help them feed their family.
> OSHA inspected this incident and fined the contractors.
The contractors are the ones that were careless... not Tesla like your selective edits tries to imply.
I get that it's fashionable to hate on Musk and his businesses right now - but come on... the implication here in your edit is absurd.
> ...Gigafactory in Austin, Texas, where one out of every 21 workers were reportedly hurt in 2022
> ...an engineer who approached a supposed shutdown robot arm but got clawed and pinned to the wall by the machine performing its programmed motions
> At least one worker was concussed after getting launched back from an explosion in the metal casting area around New Year’s 2023.
This isn't some hit piece on Tesla by way of contractor incompetence, there are substantial injuries happening to employees as well.
I've fired contractors for less.
GP's complaint appears to be that you edited your quote by eliding parts of it that seem material to the story, not that you edited your comment. Edited comments get marked as such last I knew.
EDIT: added this to check. EDIT2: seems like you're right, I thought this forum was open source so I wonder where to add a PR.
Oh wow, I hope the robots are okay!