Tesla employees said they walked through raw sewage due to their fear of causing production delays, Bloomberg reports.
Paint shop worker Dennis Duran told the publication he and some of his colleagues were ordered to walk through sewage that spilled onto the floor at the Fremont, California, factory where Tesla assembles its vehicles to keep production moving, despite their hesitations.
“Four current employees say the pressure they felt to avoid delays forced them to walk through raw sewage when it spilled onto the floor. Dennis Duran, who works in the paint shop, says that one time when workers balked, he and his peers were told, ‘Just walk through it. We have to keep the line going,'” Bloomberg wrote.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the company told Bloomberg “it’s not aware of managers telling employees to walk through sewage and that plumbing issues have been handled promptly,” according to the publication.
Concerns have been raised about worker safety at the Fremont factory. California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health has three open investigations into Tesla, though an agency representative told Business Insider it was not able to disclose the content of complaints that lead to investigations.
In April, the Center for Investigative Reporting published a report saying Tesla had misreported workplace injuries and failed to take some safety measures at the Fremont factory.
That report said Tesla failed to report injuries employees incurred while at work or mislabeled them, avoided some safety markings for aesthetic reasons, and insufficiently trained some employees for dangerous work. It added that California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health had logged over 40 violations from Tesla since 2013.
The investigative-journalism outlet said it interviewed more than three dozen current and former Tesla employees and reviewed hundreds of pages of documents, including internal records and correspondence related to injury reporting.
In a blog post, Tesla denied the allegations in the report, calling it “a completely false picture of Tesla and what it is actually like to work here” and “an ideologically motivated attack by an extremist organization working directly with union supporters to create a calculated disinformation campaign against Tesla.”
You can read Bloomberg’s full story here.
If you’ve worked for Tesla and have a story to share, you can contact this reporter at mmatousek@businessinsider.com.
Leave a Reply
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
