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Comment by slabity | Hacker News Reader

> The Information reported some of the gruesome incidents that have occurred at the Gigafactory in Austin, Texas, where one out of every 21 workers were reportedly hurt in 2022. The data is derived from the required injury reports Tesla submits to OSHA.

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?

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Because if you invert it, it's "the average employee suffers some injury every 21 years. That injury might be a papercut or a twisted ankle or a missing arm.

OSHA tracks this and is a much more reliable source than a random article.

a more informed report as they went by the OSHA reports

https://aa.law/blog/tesla-received-triple-the-amount-of-osha...

It actually highlights probably the major problem. The article you linked specifies that a _single_ incident, accident or complaint can result in _multiple_ violations linked to it.

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.

I tend to agree that this stuff looks like small potatoes and they're getting extra scrutiny based on what I saw back when I worked at a (non-Tesla) factory.

How does this compare to other car manufacturers in the US? What about China and Mexico? Strange that The Verge and the Information don't provide those statistics...

FWIW some of these 'injuries' are basically paper cuts.

Yes this is one of those situations where responsible employers report more minor injuries, and then it is used against them by people who don't know better.

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.

FWIW, no they aren't.

There are multiple reported injury rates that measure different things, just as there are multiple reported unemployment rates.

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.

For those that think this is an exaggeration or joke, it's actually not. I've definitely worked for large companies doing electrical work whereby it's standard to report every single thing that requires a Band-Aid. Filling out the paperwork is so obnoxious that I'd literally claim I have electrical tape wrapped around my fingers as a preventative measure. Some companies just encourage it more. Strong argument could be made I was in the wrong because a staph infection in one of those cuts could lead to me having to take time off and trying to explain why I didn't report the small cut.

I can understand why though. If someone comes away with just a cut it's still nice to know why because it could have been from something much more serious where the person just got lucky. It's not as if they actually care about papercuts. They care if it was a near miss or not.

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