Elon Musk's Tesla Robot Attacks Engineer in Workplace
- ACS Information Age
"And one worker who died, whose injuries or death are not in these reports that Tesla is supposed to be accurately completing and submitting to the county in order to get tax incentives,"
That construction worker, a contractor named Antelmo RamÃrez, died of heat stroke while helping build Tesla's over 2,000-acre long Giga Texas factory, according to a report from the Travis County medical examiner.Â
Last year, Workers Defense Project filed a complaint on behalf of workers at Giga Texas with the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), alleging Tesla's contractors and subcontractors gave some hires false safety certificates.
"Workers report that when they needed training, they were simply sent PDF files or images of certificates through text or WhatsApp in a matter of days," Alexander remarked.Â
"There's no conceivable way workers could have even taken the training required,"
Alexander's allegations on underreported workplace injuries at the Tesla site, if accurate, would follow a trend of similar findings by state regulators and investigative journalism nonprofits over the years.
California OSHA investigators, for example, found that Tesla had left out 36 injuries in its required government filings in 2018 alone – confirming a prior report by the Center for Investigative Reporting's Reveal team, which found that the company had misclassified a number of on-the-job accidents and injuries as 'personal medical' cases to evade California regulators.
Prior to California OSHA's findings, Tesla had stated that Reveal's claims were completely false, and accused the group of secretly collaborating with laborers who were then attempting to unionize the automaker's California plant.Â
A copy of Tesla's 2021 Annual Compliance Report for Giga Texas, however, does at least document the software engineer's bloody robot attack, albeit in slim detail.Â
The scant November 10, 2021, entry describes how a laceration, cut, open wound' was inflicted on an engineer for which the cause object was a robot.
