Although many argue that robots are the way of the future, they also pose a risk to human safety. This warning is reinforced by the horrifying event that occurred at Tesla’s Giga Texas production, which is located close to Austin, when an engineer was assaulted by a malfunctioning robot.
The event happened on November 10, 2021, at the area of the manufacturing floor where the car chassis is first constructed, according to a Daily Mail story.
The event heightens worries about automation-related hazards and job safety.
The injuries
The robot, which was intended to pick up and transport recently cast aluminum automobile parts, pinned the Tesla engineer, according to witnesses, as he was in the process of writing software for other surrounding robots. The engineer left a “trail of blood” on the manufacturing floor after suffering injuries to his arm and back.
The event occurred a few years ago, and Tesla revealed it in an injury report filed with Travis County and federal officials in 2021.
The injury report said that the engineer didn’t need time off work in order to keep Texas’ tax benefits.
A short note refers to a “robot” as the “cause object” and describes a “laceration, cut, open wound” that an “engineer” has sustained.
Is everything okay?
The article states that a lawyer for Tesla’s contract employees at Giga Texas has expressed concerns over underreported injuries at the production.
Attorney Hannah Alexander said in a Daily Mail interview that Tesla has not appropriately reported incidents of injury to the authorities. Alexander provided her interaction with manufacturing workers as evidence; she is employed by the nonprofit Workers Defense Project.
Alexander claims that the underreporting continued until September 28, 2021, when a worker passed away. Antelmo Ramírez, a contractor, was the worker, and according to a report from the Travis County medical examiner, he passed away from heat stroke. This is said to have occurred when the laborer was assisting in the development of Tesla’s 2,000-acre Giga Texas facility.
“My advice would be to read that report with a grain of salt,” she continued.
“We’ve had multiple workers who were injured,” Alexander said, “and one worker who died, whose injuries or deaths are not in these reports that Tesla is supposed to be accurately completing and submitting to the county in order to get tax incentives.”
Tesla has not yet made a statement about the matter.
Tesla’s inadequate safety regulations
On behalf of the employees at Giga Texas, the Workers Defense Project filed a complaint with the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) last year. It claimed that certain hires received fictitious safety certifications from Tesla’s contractors and subcontractors.
In the past, non-profits that support investigative journalism and state authorities have expressed similar worries about Tesla underreporting incidents.
In a previous investigation, the Reveal team at the Center for Investigative Reporting discovered that Tesla had mislabeled some workplace accidents and injuries as “personal medical” cases in order to avoid state authorities.
Investigators from California OSHA discovered in another report that the business omitted 36 injuries from its required government filing in 2018 alone.
