Tesla is already under scrutiny because of its uncertain financial outlook, troubles producing a new model and safety questions about its driver-assistance technology.
Now it is coming under fire on a new front: workplace injuries.
California’s job safety watchdog said Friday that it was investigating a recent incident at the automaker’s factory in Fremont that left a worker hospitalized with a broken jaw.
It said the man, a 30-year-old millwright employed by a subcontractor, had been hit by a skid carrier, a piece of equipment used to move a vehicle through the assembly process.
The state agency, Division of Occupational Safety and Health, has six months to issue citations for any violations of workplace safety regulations.
The incident, which occurred April 9, was first reported by Bloomberg and was confirmed by the agency in an email.
Earlier this week, a nonprofit news organization, the Center for Investigative Reporting, cataloged a series of injuries suffered by Tesla factory workers. They included back strain, repetitive-stress injuries and severe headaches that one worker attributed to fumes from an adhesive. The article said that Tesla’s injury rate exceeded the industry average in 2016 and that the company had chosen not to report certain incidents as required under California labor law.
In a blog post, Tesla said the article had incorrectly counted some injuries that actually occurred away from the car plant and had relied on “outright inaccurate information.”
The Division of Occupational Safety and Health said Friday that it had opened a second inquiry involving Tesla but would not specify the nature, saying no information could be released until the case was closed.
Tesla issued a statement saying it took any injury “very seriously” and pledged full cooperation with the state agency. “Nothing is more important to us than the safety and well-being of those who work at Tesla every day,” it said.
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The company also sought to distance itself from the April 9 incident, saying the injured worker was not under its supervision.
“This injury involved a worker who had been hired by an independent contractor and was performing a procedure that had been developed by and was under the supervision of that contractor,” Tesla said. “This contractor was also responsible for reporting the injury, which they did.”
David Michaels, who led the Occupational Safety and Health Administration under President Barack Obama and is now a faculty member at George Washington University, said the reports of injuries at Tesla were worth investigating.
“If you have injuries, it means the manufacturing system is not working the way it’s supposed to, or is not well designed,” he said. “Injuries mean things aren’t working the way they’re supposed to.”
Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, has acknowledged that the company has struggled to work the kinks out of its assembly line as it gears up its first mass-market offering, the Model 3. He has described the debugging process as “production hell” and said recently that he was sleeping at the factory.
Hailed only a year ago as a rising force in the auto industry, Tesla has traveled a bumpy road over the last several weeks. The company is counting on the Model 3 to increase revenue and pare its quarterly losses. Concerns over glitches in its manufacturing process recently prompted Moody’s Investors Service to downgrade Tesla’s credit rating and warn that the company could face a cash crunch later in the year.
A federal safety agency is investigating a March 23 crash in which a California man died when his Tesla Model X sport-utility vehicle slammed into a concrete barrier on a highway near San Francisco. The accident happened with the Autopilot driver-assistance system engaged.
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California regulators are investigating an incident at Tesla’s factory in the state that involved a subcontractor who broke his jaw after getting struck by a piece of factory equipment. It’s the second probe announced by the state this month, and came just days before Tesla vigorously defended its safety record.
California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health was told of the incident sustained by a 30-year-old man at Tesla’s plant in the city of Fremont, and began an investigation on April 12, reports Bloomberg. This came days before Tesla labeled a news outlet an “extremist organization” for reporting the automaker underreported serious injuries on legally mandated forms to boost its safety record.
The worker was hospitalized, Bloomberg reported. A spokesperson for California’s industrial relations department told the news outlet the man “was struck by a skid carrier and was transported to the San Jose Regional Hospital with a broken jaw and laceration to the face.” The unnamed man was employed by a Missouri-based subcontractor called Automatic Systems Inc.
A spokesperson for the industrial relations department immediately responded to a request for comment.
Tesla sent along the following statement:
Nothing is more important to us than the safety and well-being of those who work at Tesla every day. This injury involved a worker who had been hired by an independent contractor and was performing a procedure that had been developed by and was under the supervision of that contractor. This contractor was also responsible for reporting the injury, which they did. We take any injury very seriously, and we’ll of course provide our full cooperation to Cal-OSHA. Last year alone, while Tesla’s vehicle production increased 20%, both our rate of injuries and the average severity of injuries declined significantly – and we’re working hard to reduce that even more.
Because Cal/OSHA is resource-restrained, it stands out that the agency has launched two inspections into Tesla now, Berkowitz, a former federal Occupational Safety & Health Administration chief of staff, told Bloomberg.
“OSHA isn’t like your local county health department that inspects every restaurant every year,” she told the news outlet. “It would take OSHA 150 years to investigate every workplace under their jurisdiction just once” and “most companies don’t see OSHA in their whole lifetime.”