Slashdot Mirror
Tesla Factory Workers Reveal Pain, Injury and Stress: 'Everything Feels Like the Future But Us' (theguardian.com)
Workers at Tesla's California car factory have been passing out and requiring rides in ambulances, the Guardian newspaper reported on Thursday. The conditions at the factory suggest the lengths the company is going to in order to meet its extremely ambitious production goals, and the tension employees feel between their pride in being part of the company and the stress and exhaustion the company's goals are causing them, according to the report. From the article: Ambulances have been called more than 100 times since 2014 for workers experiencing fainting spells, dizziness, seizures, abnormal breathing and chest pains, according to incident reports obtained by the Guardian. Hundreds more were called for injuries and other medical issues. In a phone interview about the conditions at the factory, which employs about 10,000 workers, the Tesla CEO conceded his workers had been "having a hard time, working long hours, and on hard jobs," but said he cared deeply about their health and wellbeing. His company says its factory safety record has significantly improved over the last year. Musk also said that Tesla should not be compared to major US carmakers and that its market capitalization, now more than $50bn, is unwarranted. "I do believe this market cap is higher than we have any right to deserve," he said, pointing out his company produces just 1% of GM's total output. "We're a money-losing company," Musk added. "This is not some situation where, for example, we are just greedy capitalists who decided to skimp on safety in order to have more profits and dividends and that kind of thing. It's just a question of how much money we lose. And how do we survive? How do we not die and have everyone lose their jobs?" The article also sheds light on the kind of manager Musk is. In early 2016, Musk slept on the factory floor in a sleeping bag "to make it the most painful thing possible. I knew people were having a hard time, working long hours, and on hard jobs. I wanted to work harder than they did, to put even more hours in," he was quoted as saying. "Because that's what I think a manager should do."
Robots don't complain.
Overvalued flash in the pan company is running at a loss and grinding its employees to a pulp.
Tell me a new one.
Instead of sleeping on the factory floor to show solidarity, perhaps he should have spent his time better analyzing production lines for improvement. A good manager doesn't work harder, a good manager works smarter. Add a person here, add a person there, lighten the individual load. Cross train and move multidiscipline employees to various stations based on demand, then move elsewhere when demand lowers.
On top of all that, his vehicles are shit, but that's another story altogether.
Read that again. 200 times for dizziness and nausia, etc. those things typically coming from environmental exposure to toxins and poorly ventilated chemical vapors. Hundreds more for physical medical problems coming from manufacturing work. If you are to compare numbers on a population and activity basis, make sure you understand what they include first. Compare that number not just to civil population in various work, but to the industry cohort. That's what courts do to find managerial negligence, and may be required here.
I actually did work at an old economy factory producing cars in the medium price range. Never heard any stories compared to Tesla. But the unions were strong at our company, maybe that's why.
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
Explains the timing of the story, especially considering that the number of ambulance transports is less than half the rate from the general population. Factory workers are healthier than the average person, but the job is also more dangerous than average. It would take a lot of additional numbers to show it being high. But it sounds like it must be high if they bothered to quote it in a story!
In my workplace experiences, the places with good worker treatment had more people advocating to join a union than the ones that treated their workers shitty. For various reasons, many of which are obvious, like that people who value being respected by their employers already quit the shitty jobs at a higher rate.
Way to compare to a nonexistent zero state. 100 ambulance calls in 3.4 years for 10,000 employees is an incident rate of 2.9 per 1000 people per year.
The hospitalization rate for people aged 18-44 is 78.9 per 1000. The rate for people aged 45-65 is 108.8 per 1000. So the rate for ages 18-65 is 2 / (1/78.9 + 1/108.8) = 91.5 per 1000.
Basically you're advocating that Tesla employees should unionize because Tesla is mistreating them by keeping them 30x healthier at work than they are at home.
Or has the tone switched, because Musk is a Trump-administration supporter (sort of) — and there is a well-organized smear and boycott campaign against him as a result?
Anyone who thinks the tone switched only recently hasn't been paying attention. People started grousing about Musk long before "The Donald" became a serious presidential contender.
#DeleteChrome
"...Tesla is mistreating them by keeping them 30x healthier at work than they are at home."
-1.
Bad math, since you don't include the numbers for Tesla employees calling 911 from home, or otherwise get hospitalized outside working hours..
The full population rate includes the Tesla employees. The only at Tesla rate does not. But you would need to establish a link between their callouts from home and their work at Tesla for that to be useful information e.g. as a condition caused by their work.
But lets extrapolate. Lets say that they call the amulance at home at the same rate they do at work (unlikely since they aren't working anymore and have been removed from the alleged source of their morbidity). From an 8 hour work day we can triple the amount of callouts to 300 and keep the population the same at 10000. So now we're at 8.8 per 1000 people per year. That's still 10x better than the general population.
"The article also sheds light on the kind of manager Musk is. In early 2016, Musk slept on the factory floor in a sleeping bag "to make it the most painful thing possible. I knew people were having a hard time, working long hours, and on hard jobs. I wanted to work harder than they did, to put even more hours in," he was quoted as saying. "Because that's what I think a manager should do.""
The best thing a boss can do is ensure he hires enough resources to do the work without pushing everyone over the brink. Occasionally, perhaps, in extraordinary circumstances, people might have to work all hours for a specific goal, but the normal state of things should be to give people acceptable working hours. I was in the military and you accept that when the balloon goes up you may be up and working non-stop, getting kip where you can, but even there it's not the norm. Aside from the brief bursts of action, there are long periods of fairly normal working conditions.
The best boss isn't the one who stays working till midnight to show that he can work harder than everybody else. Nobody feels entirely comfortable knocking off before the boss, so that kind of behaviour drives people to stay longer, work too hard and make themselves stressed, unhappy and unhealthy. The best boss is the one that leaves on the dot, every day, and expects his workers to do the same. That boss might have to take his laptop home and carry on working till midnight, that's just the breaks if you run a company. But he should not be making his employees feel uncomfortable about routinely going home at the end of their standard working hours. Perhaps Musk means well and really is trying to lead from the front, but it's quite likely he's just leading his workforce into exhaustion if he is unable to provide adequate resources to do the required work in the allotted working time.