I made a spreadsheet out of the PDF of injury rates by industry, which is much easier to sort and compare. Google removed the indentation I had added from the original, but it should be clear enough; the number of digits in the NAICS code is the indent level. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LKE00PJDDE_ZnDb1Slpq...
For the record, in 2016, the injury rate per 1000 workers for "automobile manufacturing" as a whole was 6.7; "Animal (except poultry) slaughtering" was 7.2; "Sawmills" 7.3; Tesla's was 8.1, on a level with "psychiatric and substance abuse hospitals", just above "heavy and civil engineering construction", and just below "correctional institutions", to name a few. Tesla claims they're down to 4.6 in 1st quarter 2017, but of course we only have their word for that.
The document further breaks out cases with days away from work, restrictions, or transfers (DART). That's 3.9 for the auto industry in general, 4.9 for non-poultry slaughtering, 3.9 for sawmills, and 7.3 for Tesla (from the WorkSafe report linked in the article).
So it sounds like there may actually be something to this. Weird that they decided to go with clickbait instead of just presenting the data.
"The scores don’t account for severity, however. The injuries at Tesla appear to be related to long hours and ergonomic design."
Not to say that any harm to your health should be avoided, but by auto industry standards (other than Tesla) to this day serious incidents involve losing limbs or death. I know they're pushing everyone at Tesla as the company is still losing a lot amount of money, but it's not clear that anyone being pushed is taking really serious risks -- at other auto companies, they are and the result is literally loss of limb and life. Moreover their loss is for "greedy capitalists" as the workers earn very little, have incentives to take risks, are not trained appropriately, and traditional car companies are quite profitable unlike Tesla.
The photos in the recent Businessweek coverage of auto industry safety of people missing limbs are horrible (Tesla was not mentioned therein btw).
In _Understanding Human Error_, Sidney Dekker points to a study done at the time (many decades ago) that within an industry, the guys with the most frequent small accidents had the least frequent big accidents. Of course at the time, it was not fully known that covering up small incidents would mean you almost inevitably faced a catastrophe.
>at other auto companies, they are and the result is literally loss of limb and life.
Comparing the safety history of a company that has produced fewer than 200,000 vehicles ever to companies that produce many multiples of that, annually, and have been in operation for over a hundred years is ridiculous.
Man, if you can brand yourself a "tech company" the Silicon Valley technorati will apologize for anything.
The title itself uses a basic framing technique intentionally written to fool you into a false conclusion.
1- "worse than slaughterhouses and sawmills" is more catchy than "better than X" (chose any X automaker)
2- Is the safety level of a slaughterhouses or a sawmill comparable to a car's ? They are things not in the same category, with different sophistication level and different purpose, how many times a day an average person will enter a slaughterhouse or a sawmill ?
Title here is misleading. Actual title of article at LA Times is "Tesla had worse safety records than slaughterhouses and sawmills" - note "had", past tense. The records in question are from 2015, and as the article says, they are working on improvements.
And even then, the records are for number of incidents rather than severity. The two specific things they mention are tendinitis and carpal tunnel, which suck, but aren't the sort of injuries one associates with sawmills...
It's analagous to saying "Elon Musk's mouth has worse bacterial contamination than petri dish of Lyme Disease." Sure, by number of bacterial agents, Musk's mouth is more contaminated... But that's not a very useful statement unless you want to mislead people.
Most sawmill injuries involve splinters and worn out work gloves with holes in them.
Machinery doesn't kill people every day at Tesla nor at sawmills but considering the differences between the workplaces it's impressive that the number of little injuries at an auto manufacturer adds up to the number of little injuries in a sawmill.
I don't think you would get much productive discussion for the article, which makes apples to oranges comparisons, misrepresents the report or focuses on irrelevant details. The report itself is fairly clear and easy to read and probably serves as a much better starting point for a discussion. The report is linked in the article - http://worksafe.typepad.com/files/worksafe_tesla5_24.pdf
Even the report is a bit misleading, comparing Tesla's yearly rates to the same-year averages paints the picture that Tesla got an additional 15% more risky than the industry in one year. About a quarter of the y/y change in the industry average between 2014 and 2015 is apparently residual[0]. There are only three points, but the residuals on the slope of Tesla's TRIR are lower than the residuals on the industry average [1]. What this basically shows us is that Tesla hasn't been a company long enough to establish a trend, upward or downward, of workplace injury. Worksafe Inc.'s report claims that Days Away, Restricted [activity], and Transfer[red] (understandably [given how inconsistent OSHA themselves are about what it stands for] misquoted as Days Away Transfer Rate) is a better indicator of rates of serious injury, but it's obvious to a layperson that days off, even on a 300 form, are discretionary. It could just as easily be the case that Tesla workers are encouraged to take days off for more minor injuries.
Is there any chance that we can change the rules to make comments about the title and it's clickbaitiness off limits? This is getting to be the majority of comments.
FWIW, the article is written in a vindictive and personal tone; there's basically no way that's going to generate a balanced discussion about the ethics of workplace risk, or the usefulness of labour statistics.
Interestingly, Tesla's approach is to hire ergonomics experts to help address the repetitive stress injuries (severe tendinitis and carpal tunnel).
Compare that with the slaughterhouse industry:
"In recent years, the industry has bragged about dramatic reductions in worker injuries. What they’ve failed to report is that the OSHA injury form was recently re-written to omit the category of repetitive stress injuries – the most commonly reported injury in the industry."
So, Tesla is being compared on reported injury rates to slaughterhouses, whose standards have been re-written to exclude reporting the most common types of injuries, which just-so-happen to be the types Tesla is reporting?
(Note that the quote above comes from a pro-vegan site, so it isn't unbiased).
Tesla alleges they have the lowest injury rate for 2017. The report analyzed data from 2014 to the end of 2016 and found Tesla's injury rate to be higher than the average. They allege that there is not enough data released for 2017 to substantiate Tesla's claim.
That should be in the title of the article. "Safety incidents at Tesla plant were 31% higher than industry average in 2015".
Without the 31% higher, you'd expect a 50-50 chance of being above or below the average. 31% higher sounds like its might be statistically significant. You'd need other numbers to be sure - e.g. if there are only 1.53 incidents on average, then Tesla might be the unlucky factory that had 2 incidents instead of 1.
Doesn't it? If Tesla is about as dangerous as slaughterhouses and sawmills, and Tesla is more dangerous than other automakers, then it follows that other auto makers are less dangerous than slaughterhouses and sawmills.
The headline says “worse than slaughterhouses and sawmills”, not, “abous as dangerous as”.
So no, it doesn’t answer the question. It could be that slaughterhouses and sawmills are really safe—say 3 on a 1-10 scale—while automakers are 6 and Tesla is 8.
Even the new title, "Safety incidents at Tesla plant were higher than industry average in 2015".
Who cares? The very definition of "industry average" means that someone in the industry will be above or below the average. Why would I want to read about that? Why pick on Tesla? because they're popular?
Did they claim otherwise about their 2015 numbers anywhere? The only thing they mention is about Q1 2017. The 2017 numbers seemed to have improved drastically, something the article recognises (but the HN headline does not :S).
Read the report and you'll find out Tesla frequently has to update its numbers after the fact. So, yes Q1 2017 might look good NOW but in 3 months after injuries manifest and other claims come in (IBNR), it could turn to total shit. Tesla wants you to forget they frequently have to raise their numbers after the fact.
So, if history is any indicator, Tesla should shut its trap until it has a full year, after revisions, that show it's genuinely superior. Oh, I made myself laugh.
"Tesla did not dispute the numbers. “We may have had some challenges in the past as we were learning how to become a car company, but what matters is the future,” a company spokesman said. “With the changes we’ve made, we now have the lowest injury rate in the industry by far.”"
> The records show a rate of safety incidents reported at the company’s Fremont, Calif., auto plant significantly higher than the auto industry average — as much as 31% higher in 2015.
That's unusual in the auto industry. Usually, plants run a second shift rather than paying overtime to the first shift. It's cheaper. Accident rates go up and quality goes down as employees get tired. You have to have a meal break in there, which costs more line downtime than a shift change.
Yes there are unions involved, from the 3rd and 4th last paragraphs:
> Alan Ochoa said long hours repeating the same moves over and over with a drill caused enough hand pain to prevent him from working. He was given an office job but said carpal tunnel injuries prevented him from typing on his laptop.
> Tesla has made improvements, he said. “But why did they change? They changed because of its union efforts.”
"Average" is a colloquial term referring to any measure of central tendency. The arithmetic mean is just the most common kind of average, not the only kind.
I think the key point here is Musk is moving as quickly as he can towards automatic and robots. Unionization will only push him to do that harder, speeding up until humans are factored out of the equation along with their jobs.
>I'd bet that there is some PR firm trying to drum up anti Tesla sentiments.
Anything anti-Tesla is part of some PR conspiracy. Meanwhile, 10 vapid, fluff-pieces from Electrek or random Musk tweets show up on the front page every week.
Have you considered that, perhaps, it's not all rainbows and unicorns with this company?
Yeah and that PDF: misleading graphics, and no standard deviation. Someone has to be above average and it intuitively makes sense that the rushing upstart would be, but how bad is it really? You can't tell without more statistics
There's no defending Tesla's worker rights or saftey record. This is a company that's stood at the brink of failure for years and only survives through the blood, sweat, and tears of its employees.
Maybe you believe Elon when he says that it's worth it, but there's no arguing that it's a steep price to pay.
It's incredibly frustrating that no one has figured out a way to bring about the kind of transformative change that Tesla is after without such back breaking sacrifice. But I think the fact remains there's too much non-linearity in the means of production to get where Elon is trying to go without pushing his people to the limit.
The only "answer" I can give is just that I hope TSLA employees are getting enough equity to make it all worth it.
I don't think line workers should be asked to sacrifice their health to make the company successful. It is highly unlikely they are getting any meaningful stock options or bonuses associated with their level of sacrifice.
It isn't the equivalent of a startup employee working through the holidays to ship code. The benefits of workplace ergonomics, not only to employee health but also to production speed, have been known for decades. Tesla doesn't have to reinvent the wheel here.
I imagine the stress level on the software engineers is equally insane and perhaps just as debilitating as the physical labor of the line workers.
It's no justification, but IMO you simply can't get where Elon is trying to go without that level of sacrifice from the people carrying the load.
Tesla apparently made a lot of basic mistakes in designing their initial production line, as you say, basic ergonomic failures. Now what we hear as they scale up for Model 3 is that it's people building machines that build cars. If there's a human actually on the Model 3 "line" then by definition it won't run fast enough. My own experience is that automation is asymptotic in that it takes orders of magnitudes more engineering to achieve progressively more "complete" automation. Not everything will be automated, and the whole line will run so hard that the parts which aren't will be absolutely brutal to keep up with. But I have absolutely zero evidence for this, it's just a hunch.
Really? The fact that this article is based on 2015 stats, and the company has improved to be significantly better than the industry average since then is a pretty good defense...
Learning from mistakes is one of the key traits of successful people and companies.
In the dozen or so articles I've read on TSLA factory conditions and manufacturing culture, I think to describe it as a "mistake" is a gross mischaracterization.
Elon himself has said, to stay alive they have had to push harder than imaginable. He tries to put himself in the center of it -- work the longest hours, face the worst of the conditions. Which is admirable but still a glaring symptom.
Elon is the king at the head of the charge. But it's still a bloody charge all the same.
What, exactly, is "worth it", though? SpaceX, sure, that could be worth it. They're actually innovating.
But Tesla? A goddamn car company? What the hell is so important about fancy cars for rich people that they have to screw the workers for?
Sure, they call themselves an "energy company", and they have made "amazing advances in energy technology", but both Tesla's fancy solar panel AND battery "advances" are literally just licensed Panasonic tech.
Global warming. We're at or past the tipping point already, but electric cars and solar houses are definitely the direction we need to be going if we want to avoid disastrous and irreversible climate change. If--if--Tesla can help make that happen, it'll be worth a lot of sacrifice.
I think it's a mistake to think that a more efficient personal vehicle can make the difference in climate change. The fundamental problem is that personal vehicles are NOT efficient, except on a personal level. A disruption in transportation is needed. Trains that are cheap and easy to install would do it. Something out of left field that hasn't been invented yet could do it. But improving cars can only ever be an incremental change, and we're well past the point where incremental changes can help.
While I agree that efficiency won't make much difference by itself, you should see the bigger picture. Electrical vehicles allows people to use renewable sources. Autonomous driving allows people to buy less cars.
Long term they will also be more ecological to keep and maintain: They are simpler machines that break much less, and batteries are pretty much the only thing that will need replacement, which will eventually be 100% recycled using renewable energy.
Alone, no, not at all. But no one change was ever going to be enough. Electric cars (and home solar, which, as I mentioned, Tesla is also big into) can both be parts of the larger puzzle.
It has built and proven that electric cars are feasible. It has built THE trailblazing electric car. It is the iPhone of cars. All other manufacturers are now scrambling to catch up and build their own. Consequently we'll see millions of these cars. Unsure how many rockets we'll see...
> I think the fact remains there's too much non-linearity in the means of production to get where Elon is trying to go without pushing his people to the limit.
What is the basis for that? It is an easy rationalization for an issue with serious consequences.
For far too many problems the work doesn't subdivide cleanly. A single person "pulling" for 16 hours a day at a given problem achieves 2x more than two people pulling at it for 8 hours each.
Or to put it another way, when Jeff Dean pulls an all nighter and commits code at 6am before collapsing under his desk for a few moments rest, for the rest of the day, all of Google is twice as productive.
For some disciplines, yes, but it seems unlikely that factory floor work is one of those.
(Also, back when I was still pulling all-nighters, I could do 3-5 days worth of work in a night, but I'd be largely useless for the rest of the week, so it was a wash at best. Good for catching up before a deadline, but not really a strong strategy overall.)
> but there's no arguing that it's a steep price to pay.
What's so steep about it? It's marginally higher than the industry average. Some other members of industry will be higher than that average as well. The numbers in the article don't paint the picture of Tesla being a charnel house compared against its contemporaries.
The guy who volunteered to work double shifts to make a lot more money got tendinitis. Should Tesla have denied his request, on the off chance he would get tendinitis?
The Simpsons explained unions many years ago. It's spot on:
Waif: You can't treat the working man this way! One of these days we'll form a union, and get the fair and equitable treatment we deserve! Then we'll go too far, and become corrupt and shiftless, and the Japanese will eat us alive!
japanese did not eat us automotive industry alive because of unions. japanese primarily eat the us automotive industry alive because of far superior manufacturing innovation.
German car manufacturers are heavily unionized. It's one of the sectors with the strongest union presence. They also outcompete US manufacturers. Maybe, just maybe, unions are not to blame. Maybe, just maybe, data indicates that management may have something to do with it.
I can tell you that German automotive unions (OEMs and suppliers) are among the main opponents of electromobility. ZF, Mahle ... a lot of components are just no longer needed for a gearless EV where the motor consists of a large coil instead of thousands of high-precision parts.
They are also responsible for making sure that government grants flow into OEMs instead of generic EV charging infrastructure.
We regularly have reengineering projects for end-of-line testing equipment and other test benches where we are contractually required to guarantee that the new version does not make the personnel operating the equipment redundant (i.e. it may not be more efficient than the 15 year old version). (I won't blame anyone for disbelieving this.)
So, yes, they are very much against manufacturing improvements.
Union-management relations used to be better in the US as well. There was a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court that required that relationship to become more adversarial.
The ideal labor innovation would allow for unions to be subject to competitive pressure the way that companies are (ideally, assuming a functioning marketplace rather than oligopoly, crony capitalism etc) so that unions could evolve in the same way that companies evolve.
A union that faces no competition becomes sclerotic just like a monopoly company.
For the record, in 2016, the injury rate per 1000 workers for "automobile manufacturing" as a whole was 6.7; "Animal (except poultry) slaughtering" was 7.2; "Sawmills" 7.3; Tesla's was 8.1, on a level with "psychiatric and substance abuse hospitals", just above "heavy and civil engineering construction", and just below "correctional institutions", to name a few. Tesla claims they're down to 4.6 in 1st quarter 2017, but of course we only have their word for that.
The document further breaks out cases with days away from work, restrictions, or transfers (DART). That's 3.9 for the auto industry in general, 4.9 for non-poultry slaughtering, 3.9 for sawmills, and 7.3 for Tesla (from the WorkSafe report linked in the article).
So it sounds like there may actually be something to this. Weird that they decided to go with clickbait instead of just presenting the data.