I once visited the Fremont factory for a week and was required to do safety training. The person went on about how the training is only in English and you must know English to complete it. He had everyone say hi and something about themselves and about 1/3 didn’t speak any English. He just decided to keep going anyways and everyone completed safety training.
I’m not sure how typical that is in the industry. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it’s totally normal.
During the early 19th Century Ford paid for mandatory language lessons, to make cheaper immigrant labour viable in his plant. (he was remarkably "socialist" at times, for an avowed racist nazi-supporting anti-unionist providing high quality housing and out-bidding his competitors on wages. Strange man.)
During the worst periods of South African apartheid, the mining industry had it's own lingua franca which it taught all migrant workers coming into the deep mines.
Odd. I have a history book I can't lay my hands on right now (books in storage) which said there was a mining jargon for the Swahili, Xhosa, Sesotho and Swazi workers they all had to learn. It's called Fanakalo. Apparently its like a pidgin with a lot of Bantu.
But if you say they gave up and just used Africaans I can believe it.
This is so absurd, because it relies on the premise that if something has a name, that name must accurately represent the thing. After all if it did not, why would they call it that?
Why indeed. We know this is obviously false by counterexample.
The Democratic People's Republic of North Korea isn't exactly a democracy no matter which 'bits you scratch out', is it?
> States which (as of 2022) use the term "Democratic Republic" in their official names also include many that do not hold free elections and have been rated as "undemocratic" or "unfree" by organizations that gave such ratings. Algeria, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, North Korea, Laos, Nepal, and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic do not hold free elections and are rated as undemocratic "hybrid regimes" or "authoritarian regimes" by the Democracy Index (The Economist).[1]
The lesson here is to watch what people do, not what they say or call themselves.
A more enjoyable exercise is to read the full 25 point plan, leaving in the obvious antisemitism and fascistic rhetoric, because while the party gave voice to some socialist ideals early in its life, many if not most of those were abandoned as it rose to power. The final form of the Nazi Party was hardly socialist, to the point where communists, socialists and union supporters were specifically targeted for arrest, erasure and death after it assumed national power in 1933.
There's a reason Niemoller's famous quote begins:
"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist."
The type of editing you've done here is deeply dishonest.
>while the party gave voice to some socialist ideals early in its life, many if not most of those were abandoned as it rose to power
Yes, this is indeed what happens and strengthens my point. Why should we be opposed to efforts to enforce "social good" through strong centralized authority? Because this is exactly what happens. The central authority doesn't follow through and now has control of everyone's lives.
Also I was responding to a comment calling me absurd for suggesting Nazis were socialist asserting that they just called themselves that. You're moving the goal posts quite a lot by saying they "didn't follow through" with their early ideals. We could keep having this conversation with one side demonstrating socialist things Nazis actually did and continuing to move goalposts to keep the original opinion "socialism good, nazis bad, therefor nazis weren't socialist"
That is not "what happens". It is what happened with the Nazis, because the Nazis were never socialists. Its central point was always fascist in nature.
This isn't even a thing that can be honestly debated. It's just an ignorant, shallow point made by college freshmen and wanna-be podcasters who have studied the absolute smallest amount of history possible, and whom find the fact the Nazis are generally placed on the right side of the political spectrum to be inconvenient.
The Nazis were fascists.
Hitler knew what he was doing. He believed that socialist ideals were attractive to the disillusioned populace whose attention and approval the party sought. And he wanted to troll the Left.
But he wasn't a socialist, and did not believe in socialism. Instead they, in his mind, would redefine the word Socialism to fit what he believed it should be, not what it was, or how anyone understands it now, or at the time.
Viereck's interview with Hilter in 23 is fairly clear here, and conducted before the party had national power:
> ‘Why’, I asked Hitler, ‘do you call yourself a National Socialist, since your party program is the very anthesis of that commonly accredited to Socialism?’
> ‘Socialism’, he retorted, putting down his cup of tea, ‘is the science of dealing with the common weal [health or well-being]. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialist.
> "Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain lands in common. They cultivated the idea of the common weal. Marxism has no right to disguise itself as socialism. Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is patriotic.
> "We might have called ourselves the Liberal Party. We chose to call ourselves the National Socialists. We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. We demand the fulfilment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us state and race are one."
To the OP's point, Nazis called themselves socialists, but weren't. Mentioning the fact Socialist was in their party name is a cheap shot, and both ahistorical and ignorant.
It is indeed what did happen every time a state was formed or reformed on the basis of promoting social good through strong central authority.
Nazis had their own brand of socialism, sure, but there was a whole lot of overlap with the stated socialist ideals of the communist states (USSR, China in particular) and equal subsequent failure to fully live up to those ideals. (plenty of what the Nazi state did indeed fulfill those socialist ideals as well).
As before, people like you will never stop shifting goalposts to continue to justify how right you are, discussion is pretty pointless.
>It's just an ignorant, shallow point made by college freshmen
No goal posts were shifted. You claimed the Nazis were socialists, in name and deed. I pointed out they were neither, by quoting their actual words and describing their actual deeds.
But do let me know when how your sophomore history class goes.
In 1920, socialism was still about the abolition of things like state, citizenship, and class. Nazis were in the complete opposition of that by advocating for a stronger state. The idea of socialism in one country and of the state as the protector of socialism (rather than a necessary evil or an outright enemy) only appeared once it had become clear that the revolution had failed in in most of Europe.
“ The term "National Socialism" arose out of attempts to create a nationalist redefinition of socialism, as an alternative to both Marxist international socialism and free-market capitalism. Nazism rejected the Marxist concepts of class conflict and universal equality, opposed cosmopolitan internationalism, and sought to convince all parts of the new German society to subordinate their personal interests to the "common good", accepting political interests as the main priority of economic organisation,[13] which tended to match the general outlook of collectivism or communitarianism rather than economic socialism.”
He paid living wage, provided affordable safe housing and had (for the time) racially diverse hiring (as long as you weren't Jewish I guess). He certainly wasn't in favour of organised labour, collective ownership of the means of production, or anything remotely approaching democratic socialism. My language was to outcome not belief. "A fair day's pay for a fair day's work" was a banner slogan he got behind to defeat his competitors. Of course with his obsessional belief in time and motion study (Taylorism) what he thought was fair, was completely inhumane.
He refused to recognise unions & collective bargaining for decades. He was a complete scumbag, personally as far as I'm concerned. But paying high, employing black workers and immigrants, and fixing housing isn't bad.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
> ....contractors installing metal grating for elevated walkways in the factory fell to the ground due to a lack of protective equipment. Some of the metal walkway fell on top of them.
Incredible. With stories like this it's amazing the whole place wasn't shutdown by regulators until management can demonstrate competence.
If you hire someone to do work at your place of business (or home), and they fail to take the necessary precautions, why would you be held responsible?
The parent's remark suggests Tesla management was responsible and at fault; OSHA's disposition begged to differ, and that part was conveniently omitted from context.
OSHA has 2200 employees. If you’ve been around construction you’ve probably witnessed how frequent osha violations are. Most people don’t even know hardly any of the regulations. I’d be shocked if even 1/4 of the construction industry was osha compliant half the time.
The best is seeing the guy on the jackhammer with his ppe hanging around his neck.
It’s like a cultural thing. Most guys in construction don’t seem to care at all. And osha has very little influence. Think of the number of workplaces, factories, and construction sites around the country compared to how many inspectors there are…
They come in after someone reports a serious injury, normally.
This seems like pretty boring, dumb factory stuff. Even if you have a safety auditor, he can't keep someone from removing PPE when it's too hot out or what have you.
I flip houses on the side. I can tell you, it's definitely a cultural thing.
I've given my guys PPE, only to come back an hour later, respirator off, working with paint, insulation, you name it. They only put it on "when the boss is around" and sometimes not even then.
They don't have the ability to shut down entire facilities and they don't have the resources to conduct proactive inspections to correct problems before people are hurt/killed.
> They don't have the ability to shut down entire facilities and they don't have the resources to conduct proactive inspections to correct problems before people are hurt/killed.
No, OSHA doesn't have the resources to be proactive. I wish it did. How would you prevent it from being gamed? Anyway, employees can be proactive too and that doesn't require OSHA to be proactive -- it requires OSHA to (also) be reactive.
If someone is concerned over workplace safety then they should put their concern into words. Talk with your employer about your concerns. It's easiest if you write down your words anyway, but doing so is required by OSHA: if you aren't satisfied by the solution that your employer offers then you can take the same words to OSHA. It's worth noting that some states (I'm not sure which) have their own implementation of OSHA.
In the USA, any employee can, and should be encouraged to, report [0] unsafe conditions before something bad happens. OSHA has an obligation to investigate if any one of several criteria [1] are true, but one of which is:
> A written, signed complaint by a current employee or employee representative with enough detail to enable OSHA to determine that a violation or danger likely exists that threatens physical harm or that an imminent danger exists;
Your employer will almost certainly want to have resolved your safety concerns. Writing it down when talking to your employer can help with eloquence and finding necessary details. And if you're fired for discussing the concerns with your employer then there's a safety harness for you:
> Federal law entitles you to a safe workplace. Your employer must keep your workplace free of known health and safety hazards. You have the right to speak up about hazards without fear of retaliation.
I appreciate the good intention behind this post but it seems dangerously naive to the reality that most workers face.
Many employers simply do not care about worker safety. They'll claim to but the pressures they put in place ensure that it's treated as a secondary measure at best.
Most employees cannot afford to be fired for speaking up about safety. Legal protections and compensation often take months/years to come through. They are useless when you have no money for next month's rent.
Not to mention that in many places the company that fired you is often the only major employer in your area.
> Talk with your employer about your concerns. It's easiest if you write down your words anyway, but doing so is required by OSHA: if you aren't satisfied by the solution that your employer offers then you can take the same words to OSHA.
You do not owe courtesy to employer that's putting your life at risk. Its their job to know the law. Tell them nothing, give them no reason to supect you spoke to OSHA, and go straight to reporting.
The reality for most people, is that there will be retaliation and the law will not help them feed their family.
So quote those things then! The edit was designed to imply something worse than it was - or perhaps OP didn't even read the article but wanted an opportunity to rant about Tesla.
I read the article. I did not edit my comment. And the fact that this incident involved contractors doesn't make Tesla any less culpable, especially considering the pattern of accidents across their properties. This case just seemed to highlight how carelessly Tesla and those they contract with are about safety.
If you're going to quote something, do it right. Making things up (effectively what happened here) just so you can stand on a soap box and complain about something/someone is absurd.
The OP selectively edited the quote to leave out the most important fact, knowing most people would not read the article and would just cargo-cult upvote the sentiment of not liking Musk and/or his companies. Cheap internet points for the win...
It was a rhetorical question. The article isn't bunk: you certainly haven't made any more convincing arguments than it did in the counterfactual with your witch hunt on quoting.
Being fined doesn't undo the violation having happened. The original comment wasn't anywhere near as egregious as you've gone on about it, and the worst cases mentioned in the article weren't those contractors' accidents anyways when you've got things like intentionally ignoring dangerous conditions:
> Another worker claims the molding machine also didn’t correctly seal and often spat out molten metal. When a worker presented a solution to fix the issue, they were reprimanded that shutting it down would slow production output.
_
You seem to have more of a chip on your shoulder about defending Elon against an imagined unfairness in treatment than the actual violations that took place.
You'd think eventually Elon defenders would realize how "cool" it is to attack Elon at a given time tends to map pretty cleanly to when he does attack-worthy things. At which point it's not so much "attacking" as it is "speaking on reality as it exists".
GP's complaint appears to be that you edited your quote by eliding parts of it that seem material to the story, not that you edited your comment. Edited comments get marked as such last I knew.
The contractors won the bid because they were willing to cut corners. Tesla wasn’t blindsided by shoddy work, they’re building on the cheap and know exactly what they’re doing.
> This article is just links to other articles with absolutely no data or real analysis.
This is unconscionable. Many of the other linked Verge articles include links to external information sources in the first couple of paragraphs, and the fact that it takes two clicks instead of one means that The Verge is fabricating stories.
In that news organizations who choose to print negative information about musk or his companies may only do so knowing that musk is highly litigatious?
To be clear, this is something that's been happening over the course of the past few years. This is not, as I was originally led to believe by this deceptive headline, an active Skynet scenario.
This is not an indication that the workers aren't taken care of or that safety isn't a priority. On average there is one injury per 21 worker years. That includes minor bumps and scrapes.
>where one out of every 21 workers were reportedly hurt in 2022.
Yeah, I've worked places where if you got a papercut you had to report it to HR. They had a web portal for it. Had to do it in order to receive a band-aid once.
We were also strictly forbidden from having medical supplies on-prem. No advil, no bandaids, no nothing.
I'd assume those numbers are high because of a similar system in place there.
The article specifically calls out unreported incidents and hazards that Tesla ignored. How are you drawing the conclusion that Tesla overreports injuries?
And then there's common sense. I got a papercut once and asked my manager where I could find band-aids because the company nurse wasn't in that day. He took me to a first-aid station and said "I'm technically supposed to fill out an injury report but I'm not going to bother if you don't want me to." We both agreed that doing that for a paper cut would be stupid and got on with our days.
"When a worker presented a solution to fix the issue, they were reprimanded that shutting it down would slow production output."
There is an entire book about this called The Machine that Changed the World, written in 1990.
It is about how American car builders, like General Motors, had this philosophy all through the 70s and 80s, to never stop the line because it slowed production, and ignore people making suggestings, just fix everything in rework (after the car is finished).
At the same time, Japanese automakers were adopting the philosophy of stopping the line when there are issues, in fact you are trained to do this, then root-causing the problem, fixing it, and listening to workers (and in fact, many engineers have to start out working on the line). Japanese makers improved quality and production efficiency at the same time, something Americans thought was contradiction in terms, and this is why the Japanese won in the 80s and 90s. Since then basically every single automaker that is still in business has adopted pieces of that philosophy.
I dont understand why Tesla seems to be thinking they can ignore 100+ years of knowledge and experience in manufacturing wisdom. I have seen ex-Tesla people on the internet even call factory workers "button pushers". This is not what factory workers are in a modern manufacturing system, everyone is part of a team whose goal is to eliminate waste and improve production process efficiency, the idea you can just let things spray metal everywhere and ignore people with solutions is mind boggling in 2023.
> I dont understand why Tesla seems to be thinking they can ignore 100+ years of knowledge and experience in manufacturing wisdom. I have seen ex-Tesla people on the internet even call factory workers "button pushers". This is not what factory workers are in a modern manufacturing system, everyone is part of a team whose goal is to eliminate waste and improve production process efficiency, the idea you can just let things spray metal everywhere and ignore people with solutions is mind boggling in 2023.
Because EVs are much simpler, and more specifically, Tesla's engineering philosophy is to simplify (and save money) where possible. They shave away features and use software to supplement where possible such that the final product can be easily and cheaply manufacturered. Of course the lack of emphasis on GD&T and traditional craftsmanship is exactly why their build quality is so shoddy. Functional yes, but shoddy.
EVs would not exist unless Toyota had partnered with Matsushita to bring the Toyota Production System philosophy into the production of vehicle size batteries in the 1990s as part of the G21 project to build a car for the future. Getting the high quality along with production efficiency to manufacture a vehicle sized battery had never been done before this at a scale that could be moved to a production line for a consumer product. This is what enabled the Prius to exist, in a quality and price where it could compete in the market, as described in the book "The Prius That Shook The World" ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37758630-the-prius-that-... )
Matsushita then became Panasonic which of course is still a major partner for Tesla.
I've spent many years in the places which, most of you arm-chair-experts have never seen (lets just call it "the places of heavy metal"):
- "mega-bucks companies" don't care about federal, state, local laws. they only care about their corporate policy,
- "mega-bucks companies" typically have toothless safety managers, but they generally can't stop things after ops goes over their head, these safety managers+programs exist mostly as a front,
- corporations exist in order to insulate most employees (especially "managers") from personal responsibility from "bad things happening,"
- employees which are injured to anything past a minor extent are taken into a back room with HR, given the instruction of:
1] take a large payment (paid through the same channel as their paycheck)
2] never speak of the incident to anybody, EVER, including any co-workers, lawyers, and anybody else (although they can tell their spouse and their personal physicians),
3] must resign from their position (not always!), or they are terminated without cause (right-to-work state) as part of their backroom settlement,
33] maybe they forge retroactive "resigned/termed the day before" in order to get around the osha reporting (can't report an injury happening "today" about an employee who "quit yesterday" ha ha ha),
4] they have to give 90%+ of the money back if the employer can prove (in court) that the employee broke their bye-bye agreement.
edit more: of course this is all probably illegal, but they are giving the person just enough money to be sure they will not want to talk. MANY become injured as the goal, of getting this type of large lottery payment. some payments are 10x the pay of the entire year, and these are just poor people, they ALWAYS take the money.
so the employee that got blown up by the moulding machine probably got a huge backroom offer to claim they had resigned the day before the incident, or they were terminated without cause (right-to-work state), that's why there was nothing to report to osha in terms of personnel injuries.
oldest trick from the book. video footage is suddenly unavailable if it is too inconvenient for the HR narrative.
they do a similar with drug tests after you cause an accident: if you know you'll fail, you just clock out and go home. nobody asks because everybody knows. first thing the next day, they pull you in for the drug test that you're ready to pass.
that being said, most employees who get injured at work are usually high (edit: they're high most days, and then either high or not high in the moment they get injured)
sorry for my english but you gringos don't build anything anymore because it's too difficult to keep shit under wraps, unless it's a right-to-work state. in the old days of american making goods, people were injured all the time.
think I am bullshitting? go make some farmer friends, and make some mechanics friends, eventually you'll know friends-of-the-friends who have missing fingers, etc., and they laugh as they tell you the story. they laugh because they got paid to lie. they laugh because they were paid to never say they got paid. they laugh because the actual way they got hurt is too bad to say.
blood mist cloud.
one of you data freaks should plot the:
1] illegal immigration rate in right-to-work vs not states
2] the lack of osha reports in such right-to-work states compared to those same industries in the not states
- I bet you do not find the same amounts of industries in the not-right-to-work states!
3] overwhelming osha compliance in not-write-to-work states
you may find something interesting.
AI can not come soon enough for these business leaders, all of these get-hurt-on-purpose workers will be gone!!!
I think the only difference is, those who get hurt for the payment, and those who were just trying to do a good job and were hurt honest by the system.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadI’m not sure how typical that is in the industry. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it’s totally normal.
During the worst periods of South African apartheid, the mining industry had it's own lingua franca which it taught all migrant workers coming into the deep mines.
But if you say they gave up and just used Africaans I can believe it.
This is so absurd, because it relies on the premise that if something has a name, that name must accurately represent the thing. After all if it did not, why would they call it that?
Why indeed. We know this is obviously false by counterexample.
The Democratic People's Republic of North Korea isn't exactly a democracy no matter which 'bits you scratch out', is it?
> States which (as of 2022) use the term "Democratic Republic" in their official names also include many that do not hold free elections and have been rated as "undemocratic" or "unfree" by organizations that gave such ratings. Algeria, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, North Korea, Laos, Nepal, and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic do not hold free elections and are rated as undemocratic "hybrid regimes" or "authoritarian regimes" by the Democracy Index (The Economist).[1]
The lesson here is to watch what people do, not what they say or call themselves.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_republic
There's a reason Niemoller's famous quote begins:
"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist."
The type of editing you've done here is deeply dishonest.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-party...
Yes, this is indeed what happens and strengthens my point. Why should we be opposed to efforts to enforce "social good" through strong centralized authority? Because this is exactly what happens. The central authority doesn't follow through and now has control of everyone's lives.
Also I was responding to a comment calling me absurd for suggesting Nazis were socialist asserting that they just called themselves that. You're moving the goal posts quite a lot by saying they "didn't follow through" with their early ideals. We could keep having this conversation with one side demonstrating socialist things Nazis actually did and continuing to move goalposts to keep the original opinion "socialism good, nazis bad, therefor nazis weren't socialist"
This isn't even a thing that can be honestly debated. It's just an ignorant, shallow point made by college freshmen and wanna-be podcasters who have studied the absolute smallest amount of history possible, and whom find the fact the Nazis are generally placed on the right side of the political spectrum to be inconvenient.
The Nazis were fascists.
Hitler knew what he was doing. He believed that socialist ideals were attractive to the disillusioned populace whose attention and approval the party sought. And he wanted to troll the Left.
But he wasn't a socialist, and did not believe in socialism. Instead they, in his mind, would redefine the word Socialism to fit what he believed it should be, not what it was, or how anyone understands it now, or at the time.
Viereck's interview with Hilter in 23 is fairly clear here, and conducted before the party had national power:
> ‘Why’, I asked Hitler, ‘do you call yourself a National Socialist, since your party program is the very anthesis of that commonly accredited to Socialism?’
> ‘Socialism’, he retorted, putting down his cup of tea, ‘is the science of dealing with the common weal [health or well-being]. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialist.
> "Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain lands in common. They cultivated the idea of the common weal. Marxism has no right to disguise itself as socialism. Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is patriotic.
> "We might have called ourselves the Liberal Party. We chose to call ourselves the National Socialists. We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. We demand the fulfilment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us state and race are one."
https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2007/sep/17/greatint...
To the OP's point, Nazis called themselves socialists, but weren't. Mentioning the fact Socialist was in their party name is a cheap shot, and both ahistorical and ignorant.
It is indeed what did happen every time a state was formed or reformed on the basis of promoting social good through strong central authority.
Nazis had their own brand of socialism, sure, but there was a whole lot of overlap with the stated socialist ideals of the communist states (USSR, China in particular) and equal subsequent failure to fully live up to those ideals. (plenty of what the Nazi state did indeed fulfill those socialist ideals as well).
As before, people like you will never stop shifting goalposts to continue to justify how right you are, discussion is pretty pointless.
>It's just an ignorant, shallow point made by college freshmen
Yawn. Don't bother responding. I certainly won't.
But do let me know when how your sophomore history class goes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism
He refused to recognise unions & collective bargaining for decades. He was a complete scumbag, personally as far as I'm concerned. But paying high, employing black workers and immigrants, and fixing housing isn't bad.
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?
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.
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.
OSHA tracks this and is a much more reliable source than a random article.
https://aa.law/blog/tesla-received-triple-the-amount-of-osha...
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.
Incredible. With stories like this it's amazing the whole place wasn't shutdown by regulators until management can demonstrate competence.
From the beginning, the appeal of Texas for Elon has been lower regulatory oversight.
> OSHA inspected this incident and fined the contractors.
If you hire someone to do work at your place of business (or home), and they fail to take the necessary precautions, why would you be held responsible?
The best is seeing the guy on the jackhammer with his ppe hanging around his neck.
It’s like a cultural thing. Most guys in construction don’t seem to care at all. And osha has very little influence. Think of the number of workplaces, factories, and construction sites around the country compared to how many inspectors there are…
This seems like pretty boring, dumb factory stuff. Even if you have a safety auditor, he can't keep someone from removing PPE when it's too hot out or what have you.
I've given my guys PPE, only to come back an hour later, respirator off, working with paint, insulation, you name it. They only put it on "when the boss is around" and sometimes not even then.
https://facilityexecutive.com/calosha-cites-disney-construct...
They don't have the ability to shut down entire facilities and they don't have the resources to conduct proactive inspections to correct problems before people are hurt/killed.
So the Democrats as well.
No, OSHA doesn't have the resources to be proactive. I wish it did. How would you prevent it from being gamed? Anyway, employees can be proactive too and that doesn't require OSHA to be proactive -- it requires OSHA to (also) be reactive.
If someone is concerned over workplace safety then they should put their concern into words. Talk with your employer about your concerns. It's easiest if you write down your words anyway, but doing so is required by OSHA: if you aren't satisfied by the solution that your employer offers then you can take the same words to OSHA. It's worth noting that some states (I'm not sure which) have their own implementation of OSHA.
In the USA, any employee can, and should be encouraged to, report [0] unsafe conditions before something bad happens. OSHA has an obligation to investigate if any one of several criteria [1] are true, but one of which is:
> A written, signed complaint by a current employee or employee representative with enough detail to enable OSHA to determine that a violation or danger likely exists that threatens physical harm or that an imminent danger exists;
Your employer will almost certainly want to have resolved your safety concerns. Writing it down when talking to your employer can help with eloquence and finding necessary details. And if you're fired for discussing the concerns with your employer then there's a safety harness for you:
> Federal law entitles you to a safe workplace. Your employer must keep your workplace free of known health and safety hazards. You have the right to speak up about hazards without fear of retaliation.
[0]: https://www.osha.gov/workers/file-complaint
[1]: https://www.osha.gov/workers/handling
[2]: https://www.osha.gov/workers
Many employers simply do not care about worker safety. They'll claim to but the pressures they put in place ensure that it's treated as a secondary measure at best.
Most employees cannot afford to be fired for speaking up about safety. Legal protections and compensation often take months/years to come through. They are useless when you have no money for next month's rent.
Not to mention that in many places the company that fired you is often the only major employer in your area.
You do not owe courtesy to employer that's putting your life at risk. Its their job to know the law. Tell them nothing, give them no reason to supect you spoke to OSHA, and go straight to reporting.
The reality for most people, is that there will be retaliation and the law will not help them feed their family.
> OSHA inspected this incident and fined the contractors.
The contractors are the ones that were careless... not Tesla like your selective edits tries to imply.
I get that it's fashionable to hate on Musk and his businesses right now - but come on... the implication here in your edit is absurd.
> ...Gigafactory in Austin, Texas, where one out of every 21 workers were reportedly hurt in 2022
> ...an engineer who approached a supposed shutdown robot arm but got clawed and pinned to the wall by the machine performing its programmed motions
> At least one worker was concussed after getting launched back from an explosion in the metal casting area around New Year’s 2023.
This isn't some hit piece on Tesla by way of contractor incompetence, there are substantial injuries happening to employees as well.
I've fired contractors for less.
The OP selectively edited the quote to leave out the most important fact, knowing most people would not read the article and would just cargo-cult upvote the sentiment of not liking Musk and/or his companies. Cheap internet points for the win...
Being fined doesn't undo the violation having happened. The original comment wasn't anywhere near as egregious as you've gone on about it, and the worst cases mentioned in the article weren't those contractors' accidents anyways when you've got things like intentionally ignoring dangerous conditions:
> Another worker claims the molding machine also didn’t correctly seal and often spat out molten metal. When a worker presented a solution to fix the issue, they were reprimanded that shutting it down would slow production output.
_
You seem to have more of a chip on your shoulder about defending Elon against an imagined unfairness in treatment than the actual violations that took place.
You'd think eventually Elon defenders would realize how "cool" it is to attack Elon at a given time tends to map pretty cleanly to when he does attack-worthy things. At which point it's not so much "attacking" as it is "speaking on reality as it exists".
GP's complaint appears to be that you edited your quote by eliding parts of it that seem material to the story, not that you edited your comment. Edited comments get marked as such last I knew.
EDIT: added this to check. EDIT2: seems like you're right, I thought this forum was open source so I wonder where to add a PR.
This is unconscionable. Many of the other linked Verge articles include links to external information sources in the first couple of paragraphs, and the fact that it takes two clicks instead of one means that The Verge is fabricating stories.
Oh wow, I hope the robots are okay!
Yeah, I've worked places where if you got a papercut you had to report it to HR. They had a web portal for it. Had to do it in order to receive a band-aid once.
We were also strictly forbidden from having medical supplies on-prem. No advil, no bandaids, no nothing.
I'd assume those numbers are high because of a similar system in place there.
There is an entire book about this called The Machine that Changed the World, written in 1990.
It is about how American car builders, like General Motors, had this philosophy all through the 70s and 80s, to never stop the line because it slowed production, and ignore people making suggestings, just fix everything in rework (after the car is finished).
At the same time, Japanese automakers were adopting the philosophy of stopping the line when there are issues, in fact you are trained to do this, then root-causing the problem, fixing it, and listening to workers (and in fact, many engineers have to start out working on the line). Japanese makers improved quality and production efficiency at the same time, something Americans thought was contradiction in terms, and this is why the Japanese won in the 80s and 90s. Since then basically every single automaker that is still in business has adopted pieces of that philosophy.
I dont understand why Tesla seems to be thinking they can ignore 100+ years of knowledge and experience in manufacturing wisdom. I have seen ex-Tesla people on the internet even call factory workers "button pushers". This is not what factory workers are in a modern manufacturing system, everyone is part of a team whose goal is to eliminate waste and improve production process efficiency, the idea you can just let things spray metal everywhere and ignore people with solutions is mind boggling in 2023.
Because EVs are much simpler, and more specifically, Tesla's engineering philosophy is to simplify (and save money) where possible. They shave away features and use software to supplement where possible such that the final product can be easily and cheaply manufacturered. Of course the lack of emphasis on GD&T and traditional craftsmanship is exactly why their build quality is so shoddy. Functional yes, but shoddy.
Matsushita then became Panasonic which of course is still a major partner for Tesla.
- "mega-bucks companies" don't care about federal, state, local laws. they only care about their corporate policy,
- "mega-bucks companies" typically have toothless safety managers, but they generally can't stop things after ops goes over their head, these safety managers+programs exist mostly as a front,
- corporations exist in order to insulate most employees (especially "managers") from personal responsibility from "bad things happening,"
- employees which are injured to anything past a minor extent are taken into a back room with HR, given the instruction of:
1] take a large payment (paid through the same channel as their paycheck)
2] never speak of the incident to anybody, EVER, including any co-workers, lawyers, and anybody else (although they can tell their spouse and their personal physicians),
3] must resign from their position (not always!), or they are terminated without cause (right-to-work state) as part of their backroom settlement,
33] maybe they forge retroactive "resigned/termed the day before" in order to get around the osha reporting (can't report an injury happening "today" about an employee who "quit yesterday" ha ha ha),
4] they have to give 90%+ of the money back if the employer can prove (in court) that the employee broke their bye-bye agreement.
edit more: of course this is all probably illegal, but they are giving the person just enough money to be sure they will not want to talk. MANY become injured as the goal, of getting this type of large lottery payment. some payments are 10x the pay of the entire year, and these are just poor people, they ALWAYS take the money.
so the employee that got blown up by the moulding machine probably got a huge backroom offer to claim they had resigned the day before the incident, or they were terminated without cause (right-to-work state), that's why there was nothing to report to osha in terms of personnel injuries.
oldest trick from the book. video footage is suddenly unavailable if it is too inconvenient for the HR narrative.
they do a similar with drug tests after you cause an accident: if you know you'll fail, you just clock out and go home. nobody asks because everybody knows. first thing the next day, they pull you in for the drug test that you're ready to pass.
that being said, most employees who get injured at work are usually high (edit: they're high most days, and then either high or not high in the moment they get injured)
sorry for my english but you gringos don't build anything anymore because it's too difficult to keep shit under wraps, unless it's a right-to-work state. in the old days of american making goods, people were injured all the time.
think I am bullshitting? go make some farmer friends, and make some mechanics friends, eventually you'll know friends-of-the-friends who have missing fingers, etc., and they laugh as they tell you the story. they laugh because they got paid to lie. they laugh because they were paid to never say they got paid. they laugh because the actual way they got hurt is too bad to say.
blood mist cloud.
one of you data freaks should plot the:
1] illegal immigration rate in right-to-work vs not states
2] the lack of osha reports in such right-to-work states compared to those same industries in the not states
- I bet you do not find the same amounts of industries in the not-right-to-work states!
3] overwhelming osha compliance in not-write-to-work states
you may find something interesting.
AI can not come soon enough for these business leaders, all of these get-hurt-on-purpose workers will be gone!!!
I think the only difference is, those who get hurt for the payment, and those who were just trying to do a good job and were hurt honest by the system.