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At SpaceX, worker injuries soar in Elon Musk's rush to Mars
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago[flagged]
- yreg 3y agoThat's always the case with space industry (or even any heavy industry), no?
- mschuster91 3y agoIn Germany, workplace injuries have gone continuously down over the decades [1], and at 1,827 per 1000 workers it's significantly less than the US with 2,7 [2]. The difference is pretty certainly due to way less regulations and enforcement in the US combined with way greedier employers. [1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/6051/umfrage/gemeldete-arbeitsunfaelle-in-deutschland-seit-1986/ https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/6051/umfrage/... [2] https://www.bls.gov/charts/injuries-and-illnesses/total-nonfatal-work-injuries-and-illnesses-by-year.htm https://www.bls.gov/charts/injuries-and-illnesses/total-nonf...
- yetihehe 3y agoFor US readers - replace comma with dot, Germans (and most other europeans) use floats with comma.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoWe also call a BigMac a Royale with Cheese.
- mschuster91 3y agoMcDonalds offers the BigMac just the same as in the US, the Royale is a different burger
- KineticLensman 3y ago> In Germany, workplace injuries have gone continuously In the UK our safety films just had John Cleese standing on a swivel chair. But the Germans had Forklift Driver Klaus [0], which is much more compelling: "Cruel but informative accidents happen". Never have I seen a forklift and a chainsaw cause so much carnage. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forklift_Driver_Klaus_–_The_First_Day_on_the_Job https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forklift_Driver_Klaus_–_The_Fi...
- baz00 3y agoI can't watch that unfortunately but I know someone who should have. I worked at a shitty hardware store when I was a student and someone got an air conditioner dropped on them off a forklift palette. It wasn't secured to it. Poor guy lost his left leg just above the knee.
- rsynnott 3y agoNot sure about that; the UK has some truly nightmarish safety PSAs in the 70s and 80s, though they were mostly aimed at children, I suppose.
- yreg 3y agoSo in Germany, 1.827 per 1000 die, but it is a sacrifice we are willing to make.
- mschuster91 3y agoThat's the total injury rate, and both the national and European governments as well as unions are doing their best to get that number to close to 0 as possible.
- yreg 3y agoOk, my point is the amount of deaths is nonzero and it is a sacrifice even European governments and unions are willing to make. We should do our best to reduce that number, but I consider the original quote nonsense. We haven't closed down all factories even though people sometimes die in factories. It is a sacrifice we are willing to make, even though we try to mitigate it as much as possible.
- _def 3y agoThat's exactly what it sounds like. From the article: > Four employees said he sometimes played with a novelty flamethrower and discouraged workers from wearing safety yellow because he dislikes bright colors.
- eddtries 3y ago> discouraged workers from wearing safety yellow because he dislikes bright colors I know for a fact Musk wears hi-vis vests so that sounds at the least hyperbole
- onetokeoverthe 3y ago[dead]
- dwighttk 3y ago> Other major space companies have also failed to report annual injury data to OSHA in some recent years. This is all about higher than average injury rates at SpaceX, but just tucks this in after comparing the injury rates
- robertlagrant 3y agoI don't know the reality; it's awful for people involved in these accidents, disappointing if it is as cavalier as it's being painted, but it does also feel like I'm being told a version of events by the attorney for the plaintiff, rather than an impartial fact-contextualiser.
- mgiannopoulos 3y agoIn defence of Reuters, articles about space companies without “Musk” in the headline do not get so many clicks. /s
- jasfi 3y agoI've always thought making people work long hours, repeatedly, would have a negative impact on their health. These injuries are far worse than I expected, but then I was only thinking about a desk job. I love what SpaceX and Tesla are doing, but it's difficult to be an Elon fan when people are being seriously hurt because of bad policies.
- pstuart 3y agoI'm a fan of what SpaceX and Tesla are trying to achieve in a technical context (cheaper space flight and electrification of transport). Elon is obviously highly instrumental in this happening and should be recognized as such. But his conduct otherwise has not been respectable and that too should be recognized. People tend to all all or nothing but the answer is usually somewhere in between.
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoIn a lot of US manufacturing plants, this stuff would get you fired. How does SpaceX get to skirt regulations?
- robertlagrant 3y agoHappy to be corrected here with citations, but I'm not sure that regulations are actually what get people fired. It's company policy.
- usrusr 3y agoCorporate policy that implements regulations would be my guess. Or, in this case, does not. Other countries are far more into preemptive enforcement of regulations than the USA, but even there things tends to only get better before they get worse. Tesla Grünheide has already racked up at least one amputation, and that's a factory, not a place where they invent new kinds of rockets.
- robertlagrant 3y agoBut regulations don't say "fire this person". They're normally far more high level than that, like, "when something bad happens, trigger a corrective and preventative actions process and write down what you found and what you're going to change, if anything".
- usrusr 3y agoEffective regulations very much do put the employer on the hook, no way to accept something like "voluntary employee risk-taking" outside of in some cases not looking for it as hard as they could. Employers are at risk of getting fined for tolerating (or worse) employee risk-taking and if those fines are sufficiently high they will certainly tell the employee "stop doing that that or else". And the last stage of "or else" certainly is getting fired, perfectly in line with other worker protection laws that might be in place that would otherwise prevent that getting fired.
- Eumenes 3y agoA worthy sacrifice for the advancement of humankind
- boeingUH60 3y agoAztec spotted, lol
- preisschild 3y ago~~humankind~~ elonkind
- dorkwood 3y agoIf you want to make an omelette, you need to crack a few eggs.
- Eumenes 3y agoAlso, chimpanzees ... haven't a few of them been sacrificed for space exploration?
- gooseus 3y agoIf only Elon was actually advancing actual humanity, and not just his own narrow idea of what humanity should be. Also, trying to establish a self-sustaining base on Mars right now is short-sighted and a tremendous waste of energy and material. Also also, how you do a thing is (often) as important as doing the thing itself, we're still suffering the consequences of last centuries megalomaniacal claims to be advancing humanity at the expense of a few people. And just in case someone mentions something like D-Day, I doubt any of Elon's workers signed on to sacrifice their bodies to "save humanity" in the same way the Allies signed up (or consented to be drafted) to save Europe.
- easyThrowaway 3y agoAlso, if a manned mission to mars goes awry with a catastrophic failure due to cutting corners and carelessness Oceangate-style, we will probably see a massive slowdown and cut funding in space exploration in the future due to the bad publicity.
- tekla 3y agoI'm still unsure as to why people are blaming Elon when I've been continuously told on this site that Glenn Shotwell is running everything.
- fernandotakai 3y agowhen bad things happen, elon is responsible. when good things happen, elon had nothing to do with it, he's useless and only do harm.
- hnbad 3y agoThe thing is that the bad things are usually failures of management, the good things are feats of engineering. Elon Musk is despite the title he bestowed upon himself, not a rocket scientist. He's an ideas guy at worst and an activist executive at best. That the first three Tesla models spell out "S3X" is entirely on him. That they're fairly decent electrical cars is not. That there are superchargers everywhere is on him. That they work isn't. Based on his own statements, his public actions and credible allegations against him, workplace safety is not something he has any interest in and is willing to sacrifice when it inconveniences him, even aesthetically. He wants to move fast and break things, including manufacturing workers. If you really think that someone who spent more time in his career networking, giving interviews, schmoozing and being CEO and representitive figurehead of multiple companies at the same time is also personally responsible for the engineering achievements of even one of those companies, you're delusional. It is however fairly easy in that kind of position to get in the way of good or important things. This is where the industry in-jokes about clueless managers and "pointy-haired bosses" came from as well as the design advise to always include one glaring mistake because managers (or clients) want to feel like they contributed something and giving them an easy error to catch is safer than risking "actual input" from them. I don't know if it's the lies we tell ourselves because we want to be entrepreneurs without sacrificing our craftsmanship or the mythological narratives that drive the ever-increasing tech bubble, but somewhere along the way some of us have started getting high on our own supply and started to believe that people like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs are actual geniuses (I think it started with Steve Jobs) rather than just very successful sales people with some broad baseline technical understanding that is enough to judge some technical decisions but not enough to make them alone.
- danw1979 3y agoTwo of the examples of injuries sustained by workers given in the article sound like a lack of awareness of one’s personal safety was a major contributing factor in the accidents… Specifically, sitting on an unsecured load on a vehicle to hold it down, and being in close proximity to a rocket engine undergoing pressure testing. I’m sure the lack of a culture of safety and availability of equipment bears some of the blame, but some responsibility has to rest with the individual to say “no, I don’t think it’s a good idea to put my head in there”.
- infecto 3y agoIts a balance. Thats why its important to have someone on the job site watching and noting issues for correction. Workers do not always think about their safety but want to get the job done as quickly and easily as possible, even if that puts their own lives as risk.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y agoThis is why employees (usually) receive occupational safety training. You can't control employee's every move, but they fact that several people thought this was ok points to corporate failure, not an individual.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y agoThis is a problem with workplace culture and corresponds to equally poor culture in the other companies Musk controls. He's moving fast and breaking things, namely people, be it his customers or employees. But no problem: pay a fine, roll out another phalanx of lawyers and there is little real cost. If CEOs were prosecuted for negligent homicide the number of preventable workplace and product deaths would surely drop to zero.
- inemesitaffia 3y agoThe article is disingenuous
- infecto 3y agoNot here defending SpaceX, cannot speak for some of the specific cases like the individual who was sitting on top of a truck to hold a load down. What I don't like though is the lack of real comparison. It reads more like a hit piece against spacex with all the specific examples of cases that tug at the heart. Would like to see some better comparison, I don't know how realistic the space industry average is. How many companies are in the space industry. The BLS total recordable cases for all US report in 2022 (cases involving days away from work and other) is 2.7 per 100. Would have liked the article to dive more into the data details instead of the specific cases. Too easy to focus on specific cases and ignore what the data means. I am not sure if comparing this to other space industry companies is fair. I have no idea who is included but are the engineers on a team included in these worker counts? So my best comparison is the total rate listed by BLS which is 2.7/100.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hef19898 3y agoUltimately, a worker sitting on top of a truck to hold down a load, is a failure of the company: rules and trainings have to be implace to avoid this unsafe behavior, managers, and ultimately the CEO, has to enforce those rules. If that doesn't happen an unsafe culture is promoted, one that leads to accidents.
- infecto 3y agoRight, but this piece did not focus on the data and instead of pulled specific examples out. I think it would have been more convincing to at least speak more on the numbers, compare it to the US averages and look at different industries within the US. If I take the BLS average of missed days and other, 2.7 is higher then what I think is the 2.2 average that spacex has across different sites. I am not saying that means SpaceX is a safe place to work but we should dive into those details more to get a better picture. Worker deaths will always exist, sometimes due to unsafe practices and sometimes the fault of the worker. Every 101minutes a worker dies in the US. This is why OSHA exists.
- virgil_ 3y agoAs some who worked there for 4.5 years, this is an accurate description of the work culture at SpaceX. You sacrifice safety for speed. As a young person it’s an opportunity to take on a lot responsibilities, but at that point in your life you don’t have the fortitude to tell Elon, who does push the agenda directly to personnel, to say you do not deem this task safe/smart/responsible. Gwynn is a sly leader that tries to balance out Elon and non-Elon agendas, but will capitulate to Elon on a regular basis. You definitely do get fired for delaying any Elon focused project, regardless of the reason, if you’re annoying enough or easily replaceable. If you want to go toe to toe with Elon you better be the most productive person, with a good track record, have a rare skill set or knowledge, and be willing to risk your career.
- virgil_ 3y agoAlso, those numbers would be way more if they actually reported all the injuries and/or caught them all. Employees definitely hide their injuries cuz they want to keep their job. If you guys only knew about the “near-misses” as well, they are wild.
- reneherse 3y agoI'm not surprised at all that the number of injuries sustained on SpaceX projects is even worse than described in the article. The article only discusses employee injuries; A full accounting would also include data from on-site contractors such as those involved in the heavy construction of the launch towers and other facilities.
- doubleDayPage9 3y ago[flagged]
- liotier 3y agoMusk would have felt right at home driving the Soviet space program !
- pauldenton 3y agohttps://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/space-race-timeline https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/space-race-timeline Given the Space Race timeline, it seems like that would mean beating NASA to MANY major milestones. 4 October 1957: The USSR successfully launches Sputnik 1, the first Earth-orbiting satellite in history. 3 November 1957: The USSR successfully launches Sputnik 2, carrying a dog named Laika into space. They become the first nation to successfully send a living organism into orbit. 12 September 1959: The USSR launches Luna 2 and accomplishes its mission of creating the first spacecraft to reach the surface of the Moon. 4 October 1959: The USSR launches Luna 3 and succeeds in their mission of sending an object into orbit around the Moon and photographing the far side of the Moon. 12 April 1961: The Soviet Union achieve a clear triumph in the space race. Aboard the Vostok 1, Yuri Gagarin makes a single orbit around the Earth and becomes the first man to reach space. He remained in space for one hour and forty-eight minutes before landing in Saratov Oblast, west Russia.
- vt85 3y ago[dead]
- AlgorithmicTime 3y ago[dead]
- 3seashells 3y agoEscaping to Mars and taking the source of why earth failed with you sounds like a stupid plan
- justapassenger 3y agoFor the keyboard warriors, defending it and telling people that it's individuals fault. Lots of you work in tech, behind the desk. If the system you're working on keeps on breaking when others interact with it - is their fault or is the system not advanced enough? If you give all your employees root access to the production, and expect them to use it wisely and care about safety - when it something breaks - is it the fault of the employee or fault of the company for allowing such a reckless actions?