Hyperdrive
Tesla Staff’s Lost Workdays Triple on Factory Injuries, Illness
- Taking headcount growth into account, time away doubled
- Musk has said goal is to have ‘safest factories in the world’
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Tesla Inc. factory employees spent almost three times as many days off the job because of work-related injuries and illness in 2018 as the year before, an indication of just how much strain they were under as they manufactured electric cars at scale for the first time.
Staff at Tesla’s lone assembly plant in Fremont, California, logged 22,454 days lost in 2018, up from 7,619 in 2017, according to a report the company submitted to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. This surge outpaced increases in hours worked, total injuries and number of cases in which injuries caused employees to be absent.