A pro-labor group reported that Tesla’s non-union factory in Silicon Valley had suffered an 87 percent higher injury rate than the unionized auto industry average in 2014-15.
Worksafe, Inc., whose lawyers won the COSH Social Justice Award, filed a report on May 24 titled, “Analysis of Tesla Injury Rates: 2014 to 2017.” The report found that Tesla’s 2014 serious injury rate was 69 percent higher in 2014, and its serious injury rate in 2015 was 103 percent higher than the average of U.S. unionized auto plants.
Worksafe describeS itself as a California non-profit organization that specializes in workplace health and safety issues. It was reportedly first contacted by Tesla workers in April to perform a comparative analysis with other U.S. auto manufacturers.
But despite suffering its own technical challenges, the shadowy non-profit’s expose was immediately picked up by virtually every mainstream media outlet. Astonishingly, a Google search of the report’s title found 10,100,000 results within 24 hours after release.
A deeper reading of the Worksafe report suggests that Tesla’s “total recordable incidence rate” (TRIR), the most important workman’s compensation standard, indicates that in 2015, the Tesala TRIR of 8.1 per hundred workers was only 31 percent higher than the 6.7 per hundred for the automobile manufacturing industry as a whole.
The union-supportive Worksafe report also does not comment that since 2014, Tesla has been operating like a technology start up. Unlike the work rules of the mature U.S. auto industry, Tesla factory workers have been involved in varied activities that could cause more injures, like moving equipment, building assembly lines, launching new vehicles.
The United Auto Workers (UAW) supposedly sent union organizers from Detroit to the Tesla factory in California, after factory worker Jose Moran posted a sophisticated article on the left-leaning Medium in February 2016 to complain: “Most of my 5,000-plus coworkers work well over 40 hours a week, including excessive mandatory overtime. The hard, manual labor we put in to make Tesla successful is done at great risk to our bodies.”
Moran lamented that “six out of eight people in my work team were out on medical leave at the same time due to various work-related injuries,” but they feared being labeled as complainers by management if they made a report. He highlighted that most Tesla production workers earn between $17 and $21 an hour, while the average unionized auto worker in the U.S. earns $25.58 an hour, and area’s living wage was $28 an hour.
The UAW union membership, which somewhat recovered from a low of 355,191 in 2009 to 415,963 at the end of 2016, is still down from 701,000 in 2002. But the trend for auto workers and the UAW looks bleak after the auto industry reported that sales were down in April, led by Ford with a 7.2 percent decline.
Tesla’s non-union workforce has grown from 10,161 in 2014 to 17,782 in 2016, and is expected to reach 40,000 at the end of 2018, with the launch this year of the virally popular Model 3. Unionizing Tesla’s workforce would be a much-needed boost for the UAW.
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