Tesla factory robot attack on employee highlights company's worker safety issues

[captaincranky]

Terrible headline which means you aren't looking to become a quality journalist rather a click baiterist

If you hadn't have read it, you wouldn't know it was clickbait, now would you? The headline, granted, was probably more suitable for the supermarket checkout line. But still.........

I'm going to nominate it for the prestigious, "National Enquirer Headline of the Year", award.

What's the trophy look like, you may be asking yourself? Picture this, but brass plated:

 

[nulll]

To tell the truth, "your buddy Elon", is doing a bang up job of making himself look bad all on his own.

In fact, the press probably had to add a few asterisks to the recent tirade he launched at Bob Iger, much less them being "mean to him".

Considering the disparity of the financial states of Musk run companies vs. Disney these days I'd suggest that Iger might consider buddying up to Musk for a round of golf or 3 to mitigate last couple of years of losses Disney has suffered. Moral of the story here is you're completely right about the C-suite temper tantrums, we're all tired of them (not to mention the constant scams and frauds considering Trevor Milton of Nikola and other scams just got sentenced very lightly). Especially when these folks are running companies that seriously affect real peoples retirement arrangements and employment with their comments and personal baggage.

If Musk wants to have a tirade about whatever then fine, he's an adult and lives in a country where you can pretty much say anything no matter how un-nuanced or unintelligent. The but comes in where he is still the CEO of several multi-national enterprises, defering the role and creating a special technical advisor role for each company (whether folks like it or not the guy actually is a genius engineer and there is certainly value in that). Same goes for Iger except he and his team need to jettison a lot of the more questionable ideals they've hoisted aboard and get back to making entertaining kids movies. There is certainly a way to modernize children's content with an eye toward bringing everyone into the fold in the modern age but we've all seen Disney and others ham-fistedly fumble the ball on this time and time again by simply being lazy. This happened before in the 90's as their animation went from the stuff of legend in the 80's with even their weekend cartoons like rescue rangers and duck tales being the bar in animation to seriously dropping off toward the 2000's (the advent of CGI being the new meta for content certainly played a part in this).

 

[Jroc187]

To tell the truth, "your buddy Elon", is doing a bang up job of making himself look bad all on his own.

In fact, the press probably had to add a few asterisks to the recent tirade he launched at Bob Iger, much less them being "mean to him".

My buddy? fun fact, He was the person of the Year in 2021 and this is what they said in the article. you guys have short-term memory
The richest man in the world does not own a house and has recently been selling off his fortune. He tosses satellites into orbit and harnesses the sun; he drives a car he created that uses no gas and barely needs a driver. With a flick of his finger, the stock market soars or swoons. An army of devotees hangs on his every utterance. He dreams of Mars as he bestrides Earth, square-jawed and indomitable. Lately, Elon Musk also likes to live-tweet his poops.

 

[BogdanR]

Improper or improperly enforced LOTO (Lock Out Tag Out) routines / policies. Mr. Musk doesn’t seem all that concerned or committed to worker safety. Maybe OSHA should have a look at some of those plants.

 

[hwertz]

I'll just point out, when I worked at P&G, we had a lock out/tag out procedure. Every employee had a lock, if I did ANY work on a machine, I turned it off, made sure it was off, placed a lock on the off switch to make sure nobody turned it back on. If as second person was going to work on it? The put a lock on too, there was room for 3 or 4 locks on there. If it was going to take more than a minute or two, we'd also place a paper tag on there explaining why it was off, when it was shut down and (if we had one) an estimate of when it'd be back up.

In a building full of plastic mold machines, inserters (to insert bristles into toothbrushes), packaging equipment, forklifts, a warehouse with more forklifts, palletizing stuff and loading pallets into semi trailers, etc. Due to a strong safety culture, in a building with 100s of employees the average there was 0.1 injuries a month (0 most months, the time I worked there there was a single minor injury which had broken a 14 month streak with 0 injuries.)

==================

In STARK contrast, the place I started working at as a student employee, then worked for about 10 years (I won't bother naming names, it's in a different building with different management now)... I worked in the computer section refurbing pallet after pallet of computers. Accident rate was well over 20% annually (they weren't tracking it, but they'd fluctuate between 10-20 employees and seemed to have an accident every month or two). They'd have student employees with no experience driving forklift (which had no brakes -- hitting the brake just disengaged the hydrostat and let it coast to a stop), also students driving and loading/unloading the 25 foot delivery truck.

Three times while I worked there, they tried to drive it under this low bridge and peeled the top off... one of them decided a truck with the roof peeled off and a pallet lift hanging off the back of the truck dragging around on the ground throwing sparks would be totally inconspicous and tried to run from the cops in it! Shockingly, I assumed they got fired but the boss then was "a bit too lax" so they just took them off truck driving duty for 2 weeks!!!! So after the 3rd truck got peeled, the boss (who'd just taken over about 6 months earlier) asked if they could just get a box truck that is like 1-2" less tall so it'd fit under the bridge... "Well of course you can!". So they did..

The floor upstairs had soft spots so pallets would tip off the pallet jack (pretty early on when I worked there I got some red tape and marked those spots!), old equipment that was not in the best of condition, and a rotation of new employees with no safety training. I did what I could, gave the computer employees some safety training; but the warehouse/delivery was managed seperately.

I was working on repairing a computer one day, heard some noise and backed up, the fork lift forks punched through the wall and speared the computer I was working on! I leaned out the warehouse door and said "I think you came in a little hot there!"

I recall one trying to bring the forklift through the front door -- it was far too tall and broke out the door frame and the glass at the front of the store and almost hit somebody sitting at the cash register. And at least 3 times when people punched forks through the garage door. An entire pallet rack tipped after getting hit by the fork lift and someone standing by the pallet got pummeled with boxes... luckily the printers in the boxes were still wrapped in styrofoam so the styrofoam kept the printers from cracking their dome.

One person (I assume they were high) managed to wrap their fingers around a pallet jack wheel, and then pulled a pocket knife and were like "No problem I'll just cut them off". They didn't cut them off, but after someone moved the jack a few inches and unwrapped their fingers they went to the hospital. That was their first and last day.

I also had a computer catch on fire, went to get the fire extinguisher, found it was missing (it had been there the week before...) and had to throw a burning computer off the second floor balcony into the parking lot! It's miraculous I worked there 10 years without any serious injuries.

(Edit: When I started at P&G, they had me spend about a minute describing the "forklift through the computer" and the "throwing a burning computer off the balcony" anecdotes, I pointed out the safety culture might seem excessive but I appreciated it preventing things like that happening!)

Good times! LOL

 

[Bobbydpue]

Nobody noticed that after Elon bought Twitter the media and government looking for anything to make Tesla and Elon look negative in the news.

I think that's a perception issue you have rather than anyone being out to get Elon. He doesn't need anyone to stick up for him he's going to be alright. What did the government do to Elon to make him look worse than he actually is?