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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.
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.
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.
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.
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