The recently established Tesla plant in Texas is said to exhibit a higher number of safety issues compared to their previous facility in California. The company appears to be operating with a concerning lack of safety measures, earning it the colloquial label of “blood vehicles,” akin to the association of blood diamonds in South Africa, with the added concern of robotic elements in the risk assessment.
Two of the robots, which cut car parts from freshly cast pieces of aluminum, were disabled so the engineer and his teammates could safely work on the machines. A third one, which grabbed and moved the car parts, was inadvertently left operational, according to two people who watched it happen. As that robot ran through its normal motions, it pinned the engineer against a surface, pushing its claws into his body and drawing blood from his back and his arm, the two people said.
The description, “pushing its claws into his body and drawing blood,” epitomizes Tesla’s failure to ensure worker safety. Is there a cartoon depiction available depicting Elon Musk’s claws penetrating a vulnerable immigrant worker to extract blood?
Does this allude more to StormFront or Swastika?
You may remember that Tesla in California allegedly was under-reporting injuries, yet still carried a much higher injury rate than the national average.
Tesla’s total recordable incidence rate (TRIR) in 2015 was 31 percent higher than the industry-wide incident rate
Here’s how the problem was being reported way back in 2018:
Undercounting injuries is one symptom of a more fundamental problem at Tesla: The company has put its manufacturing of electric cars above safety concerns, according to five former members of its environment, health and safety team who left the company last year. That, they said, has put workers unnecessarily in harm’s way. […] “Everything took a back seat to production,” White said. “It’s just a matter of time before somebody gets killed.”
Note that last line, a stark warning. Can you guess what comes next? Tesla tries to troll safety experts and then falls on its own sword.
Tesla: ‘The most important metric is fatalities, and our number is zero’
A Tesla employee died at the Gigafactory earlier this month — and the investigation is ongoing
And — the actual most important metric — did safety ever improve or only continue to get worse over time?
Tesla Fremont factory employee dies while working on production line
I have a sense that there’s a paradoxical aspect to the work here—earlier factories seemed safer when Germans, secretly provided by Siemens, ran all the construction and management. Tesla’s CEO was famously inexperienced in car manufacturing, didn’t know anything and his interference was only starting. Conversely, the newer factories will be a far greater threat to worker safety, as elaborated in a recent article in The Atlantic I co-authored.
Why?
Over time, these factories, under the influence of an unpredictable CEO, neglect historical lessons and openly violate established regulations. They increasingly recruit inexperienced individuals and sycophants, whose primary purpose is to manipulate metrics and cater to the fragile and discriminatory whims of the CEO, ultimately leading to the unnecessary loss of hundreds of lives or more. The latest reports from Germany in 2023, as highlighted by The Telegraph, depict a catastrophic situation.
‘High frequency’ of injuries at German Tesla factory included burns and amputation. Emergency services were called to the Grünheide plant 250 times last year
What you are seeing is Germany reporting actual safety numbers, while the same or higher number of incidents likely are happening at all Tesla facilities.
When it comes to safety consciousness, Germany surpasses not only Texas, China, but even California. The purported justifications behind Tesla’s move to shift production to Texas are now thoroughly documented, as detailed in tragedy by safety reports such as those from the Texas Standard.
A Texas Observer investigation found that injuries and deaths related to the construction of the Tesla factory near Austin weren’t properly reported: “…[Tesla] must report any injuries and deaths that occurred during construction. I found all these missing injuries and death. I told the county. The county has since asked Tesla to go back and provide the missing information… In general, Texas has the most worker deaths of any state, including California. A lot of workers die in Texas. The figures I polled for 2021, a worker died in Texas every 16 and a half hours and a construction laborer died every three days.”
Where a worker dies every day, Tesla’s South African-born CEO surely feels like he’s found a new home.
