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Tesla Expands Worker Injury List One Week after Elon Musk Criticizes Media for Reporting on It

posted by janrinok on Thursday May 31 2018, @02:52AM   
from the tell-the-whole-truth dept.

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

The Center for American Progress reports

Tesla has expanded its list of worker injuries following a report published in Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, which flagged under-counting and safety problems at the company's Fremont, California facility last month.

The move also comes one week after CEO and founder Elon Musk blasted the media for reporting on the discrepancies and threatened to start a Yelp-like site to rate journalists.

"Tesla disputed our reporting showing that it left worker injuries off the books", Reveal tweeted [May 29]. "Now, it's begun adding some of the injuries that had been missing."

The original Reveal report, published on April 16, claimed that Tesla officials were under-reporting work-related injuries sustained by employees in order to make the company's safety numbers appear more favorable to industry critics. The company instead wrote many complaints off as "personal medical issues or minor incidents requiring only first aid", according to internal company records. In May, pressure on the company doubled after an unfavorable review by Consumer Reports found troubling flaws in the Tesla Model 3's braking system, the second critical report from the austere publication.

Responding to the criticism last week, Musk went on a Twitter rant, claiming that the negative press was part of "a calculated disinformation campaign."

[...] Reveal's criticisms appear to have some merit, however. As the outlet noted on [May 29], following Musk's Twitter rant and the earlier media reports, Tesla officials allegedly quietly revised the company's books to add more names to the company's list of worker injuries, including at least "13 injuries from 2017 that had been missing when Tesla certified its legally mandated injury report earlier this year."

"Alaa Alkhafagi, for example, smashed his face and arm in the paint department last fall. He said he had been asked to perform a task for which he had no training", reporter Will Evans wrote. "At the time of the injury, Tesla didn't put Alkhafagi on official injury logs, even though the accident caused him to miss work. ...By late April, Tesla had added him to the 2017 logs, dating his injury Oct. 1 and noting that he missed three days of work because of it."

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Original Submission

• Chasing that OSHA Recordable Rate! (Score: 5, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Thursday May 31 2018, @07:17PM

  by DeathMonkey (1380) on Thursday May 31 2018, @07:17PM (#686878) Journal

  Soooooo glad I no longer have to chase that OSHA Recordable (injury) Rate!

  That was the worst part of my previous job as an EHS Manager. Real safety metrics are in short supply so management relies on recordable rate which is highly dependent on external factors like how much an employee likes Percocet. So you find yourself pouring over the recordability criteria and trying to lawyer your way out of calling it a recordable. All to prevent having to list it on a report that nobody ever looks at.

  So, putting that old hat back on for a sec, I'll read the actual article:

  Forklifts and tuggers zip by on gray-painted floors, differentiated from pedestrian walkways by another shade of gray.

  There’s one color, though, that some of Tesla’s former safety experts wanted to see more of: yellow – the traditional hue of caution used to mark hazards.

  Concerned about bone-crunching collisions and the lack of clearly marked pedestrian lanes at the Fremont, California, plant, the general assembly line’s then-lead safety professional went to her boss, who she said told her, “Elon does not like the color yellow.”

  A little silly, perhaps, but the regs don't specify a color scheme. So long as the aisles are clearly marked they can use whatever colors they want.

  But things are not always as they seem at Tesla. An investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting found that Tesla has failed to report some of its serious injuries on legally mandated reports, making the company’s injury numbers look better than they actually are.

  "Investigation" is a link that I figured would point to additional details about the missing injuries. Instead, it's a link to itself. If somebody knows where that report is I'll take a look but for now the claim they failed to record injuries is unsupported.

  I'd quote the actual rates here but I can't copy them

  They are pretty high! Setting up a new production line is always pretty crazy at the start, though. They are trending down as they should (but of course, you can get that trend by not including injuries).

  Last April, Tarik Logan suffered debilitating headaches from the fumes of a toxic glue he had to use at the plant.... (resulting in missed work)...

  But Logan’s inhalation injury, as it was diagnosed, never made it onto the official injury logs that state and federal law requires companies to keep. Neither did reports from other factory workers of sprains, strains and repetitive stress injuries from piecing together Tesla’s sleek cars.

  Doctors don't diagnose injury causes for recordability. (That could just be sloppy reporting, though.) An inhalation illness resulting in missed work should definitely go on the log but only if it was caused by an exposure at work. Tesla claims it wasn't. It's hard to tell without additional info. The MSDS for that glue would be the first thing to look at.

  Strains, sprains and repetitive stress injuries only go on the log if they result in "medical treatment beyond first aid." So think sutures (recordable) vs bandages (not). Or, OTC aspirin (not) but something that requires a prescription (recordable). So that all depends on the details of the specific cases which the article does not supply.

  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.

  Says every Ex EHS person, ever. It's certainly concerning but I wonder what the current people think.

  ...a lot of anecdotes that are hard to evaluate...

  The EHS turnover seems to support some of these stories but they're hard to evaluate. I've certainly dealt with management not wanting to wear all the required safety gear when they visit the floor. Of course, they don't actually need to since they're not operating machinery. It's more about optics and "what's good for the goose."

  As proof, company officials said a recent anonymous internal survey found 82 percent of employees agreed that “Tesla is committed to my health, safety and well-being.”

  That doesn't prove anything.

  Before publication of this story, a Tesla spokesman sent a statement accusing Reveal of being a tool in an ongoing unionization drive and portraying “a completely false picture of Tesla and what it is actually like to work here.”

  I've also experienced this fun charade. Once the contract gets signed they resume bitching about EHS making them wear hardhats when its warm out. But, it doesn't actually prove anything either.

  Tesla’s spokesman also sent photos of rails and posts in the factory that were painted yellow.

  Kind of funny...

  the company relied on hoists that weren’t engineered or inspected before they were used to lift heavy car parts, according to a former safety team member, resulting in repeated accidents.

  That's a serious allegation if true.

  Whoo boy! I did not realize how long this thing was when I started replying to it! A bunch more anecdotes but they don't prove anything about the central allegation of the article.

  In Tesla’s internal injury tracking system, a supervisor wrote that a worker couldn’t come to work one day in February 2017 because “his left arm was in pain from installing Wiper motors during his shift.” One worker “fainted and hit head on floor” because “team member was working in a group setting and became uncomfortably hot.” Another employee, a supervisor noted, was “highly relied upon at this workstation” but injured her shoulder from repetitive motion due to an “Unfriendly Ergonomic Process.”
  ...
  The list of the uncounted goes on. One worker had back spasms when reaching for boxes, one sprained her back carrying something to a work table and one got a pinch in his back from bending over to apply sealer and couldn’t walk off the pain.

  It's impossible to tell whether or not these are recordable without more info.

  In April 2017, Tarik Logan – a temporary worker – was assigned to patch parts in Tesla’s battery packs with Henkel Loctite AA H3500.

  Ooh a product name! So I tried to find the MSDS but don't see one for the H3500 on google (manufacturers are only required to give them to customers). The top result is a fact sheet that looks like it comes from Tesla but is actually a United Autoworkers Union publication. That's pretty interesting....

  First it brought dizziness, then headaches – the worst pain he’s ever felt, Logan said.

  “He’s a strong person,” said Toni Porter, his mother. “For him to cry out, it was terrifying.”

  Tesla referred Logan, then 23, to a medical clinic that diagnosed an “acute reaction to car adhesive glue causing headaches, dizziness, and some respiratory discomfort.” The doctor gave him prescription-strength painkillers and told him to avoid the glue.

  They have a slideshow that shows the bottle of those painkillers. It's Naproxen 500 mg. You can buy Naproxen 500mg (Aleve) over-the-counter. So that's definitely not recordable based on the meds. I'm sure they would have mentioned that the Dr said to stay home from work if he had done so so I'm giving that point to Tesla. That was not a recordable injury from what I can tell.

  They say above that he missed work due to the headaches. But, if that wasn't due to a doctor's recommendation you don't need to count it.

  Ok I give up.....this thing keeps going with the anecdotes. It's kind of a gish-gallop, honestly.

  TL;DR; the one example they provided with enough detail to make an independent judgement went in Tesla's favor.

  Although, it certainly sounds like they have a shitty safety culture.

  (sorry for the crazy long post, I had no idea what I was getting myself into!)

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Moderation		+3
  Interesting=1, Informative=2, Total=3
  Extra 'Informative' Modifier		0
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		5