At the beginning of February, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) issued a $49,650 citation against Tesla related to the August 2024 death of contract worker Victor Joe Gomez Sr. Gomez was electrocuted at Tesla’s Giga Factory in Austin, Texas on August 1, 2024.
Tesla, whose CEO is Elon Musk, has decided to contest, or appeal the citation.
And Elon has a long and sordid history of workplace safety and health failures.
When OSHA cites employers, they can accept the citation and pay the fine, or they have 15 days to reach an “informal settlement,” or they can contest the violations and penalties. It can be because they feel the fine is too high, the abatement dates are too difficult or they just don’t think they really violated the law. Contested cases then go into the legal process to be decided by Administrative Law Judges, and, if necessary, by the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC).
We don’t know yet why Elon has chosen to contest the citation. Maybe he can’t afford it? After all, Tesla stock is down over 40% since the beginning of the year.
On the other hand, with his net worth ($350 billion), a $50,000 penalty would amount to about a quarter of a cent for most Americans. It will probably cost him more than $50,000 just to have his lawyers take a look at the case.
So it’s more likely that he fears the stigma of an OSHA citation, or he just thinks it wasn’t his fault that some careless worker got himself killed.
Elon, Tesla and OSHA
In 2017, Worksafe, a California-based safety and health advocacy group, issued a report that found the rate of serious worker injuries at Tesla’s Fremont, California plant was approximately double the auto industry rate for 2015.
Tesla blamed the report and worker complaints on a “‘concerted and professional’ media campaign on the part of United Automobile Workers,” which was then trying to organize workers at the plant. Musk later said that “he wants to personally review every injury report, and meet with every injured employee to get feedback on how to improve safety.”
The following year, a major investigative piece by Will Evans and Alyssa Jeong Perry at Reveal and the Center for Investigative Reporting, found that Tesla was ignoring major health and safety issues in their Fremont plant and was making their injury numbers look better than they actually were by repeatedly failing to report some of its serious injuries on legally mandated OSHA reports.
Why? Production over safety: “Everything took a back seat to production,” according to Justine White, a former safety lead, “It’s just a matter of time before somebody gets killed.”
White, who resigned her Tesla job, described in her resignation letter how she told her boss “that the plant layout was extremely dangerous to pedestrians.” He explained to her “that Elon didn’t want signs, anything yellow (like caution tape) or to wear safety shoes in the plant” and acknowledged it “was a mess.”
Elon didn’t want signs, anything yellow (like caution tape) or to wear safety shoes in the plant and acknowledged it “was a mess.”
The report also described injuries and illnesses suffered by Tesla workers due to overexposure to toxic glues and heavy lifting, and that the company was not recording obviously reportable injuries or injuries suffered by temporary workers. Evans later went on to write an investigative piece describing in detail all the ways Tesla covered up worker injuries.
Then Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA David Michaels warned Musk that the injuries at his plant indicated a much bigger corporate issue: “Worker injuries are evidence of a bigger problem. Properly designed, smoothly running production lines do not hurt people. At Tesla, worker injuries and product defects indicate the assembly lines are not functioning well.”
Your Union or Your Life
But Elon, like his boss and co-President, is a transactional kind of guy. At a 2017 meeting with Tesla employees, Musk listened to their complaints about safety issues and promised to address their concerns….so long as they refrained from trying to organize a union.
Now it should be clear to Musk (or at least his lawyers) that workers have a legal right to organize, and that the National Labor Relations Act forbids employers from threatening workers “with adverse consequences, such as closing the workplace, loss of benefits, or more onerous working conditions, if they support a union.” (Elon recently filed a lawsuit arguing that the NLRB is unconstitutional.)
Elon was telling his employees that unless you vote against the union, you will continue to get hurt, sick or killed.
In addition, the OSHAct states that workers have a right to a safe workplace. Period. Even if they’re trying to organize a union. It’s not either/or. Employees have the right to organize a union AND to come home safe at the end of the workday.
Basically, Elon was telling his employees that “unless you vote against the union, you will continue to get hurt, sick or killed.”
To the Stars and Beyond!
Elon’s workplace safety problems were not restricted to cars; they extended into space. In 2004, Reuters journalist Marisa Taylor wrote a long, devastating piece about workers injured and killed in Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and how he thinks he’s better than OSHA regulations. Taylor reported that
Musk’s rocket company has disregarded worker-safety regulations and standard practices at its inherently dangerous rocket and satellite facilities nationwide, with workers paying a heavy price, a Reuters investigation found. Through interviews and government records, the news organization documented at least 600 injuries of SpaceX workers since 2014.
Many were serious or disabling. The records included reports of more than 100 workers suffering cuts or lacerations, 29 with broken bones or dislocations, 17 whose hands or fingers were “crushed,” and nine with head injuries, including one skull fracture, four concussions and one traumatic brain injury. The cases also included five burns, five electrocutions, eight accidents that led to amputations, 12 injuries involving multiple unspecified body parts, and seven workers with eye injuries. Others were relatively minor, including more than 170 reports of strains or sprains.
So what was the problem? Lazy, careless workers? Not exactly: “Current and former employees said such injuries reflect a chaotic workplace where often under-trained and overtired staff routinely skipped basic safety procedures as they raced to meet Musk’s aggressive deadlines for space missions.”
And Musk didn’t appear to take any of the safety problems seriously: “Musk himself at times appeared cavalier about safety on visits to SpaceX sites: Four employees said he sometimes played with a novelty flamethrower and discouraged workers from wearing safety yellow because he dislikes bright colors.”
Master of the Universe
In Elon’s view, compliance with OSHA standards is for the little guys. Elon’s $350 billion net worth is more than 500 times OSHA’s annual budget. As I told New Yorker journalist Ronan Farrow in 2023, Musk considers himself a Master of the Universe, doing work far too important to be constrained by workplace safety and health standards.
Musk considers himself a Master of the Universe, doing work far to important to be constrained by workplace safety and health standards.
Reuters’ Taylor explained that
The lax safety culture, more than a dozen current and former employees said, stems in part from Musk’s disdain for perceived bureaucracy and a belief inside SpaceX that it’s leading an urgent quest to create a refuge in space from a dying Earth.
“Elon’s concept that SpaceX is on this mission to go to Mars as fast as possible and save humanity permeates every part of the company,” said Tom Moline, a former SpaceX senior avionics engineer who was among a group of employees fired after raising workplace complaints. “The company justifies casting aside anything that could stand in the way of accomplishing that goal, including worker safety.”
So will Elon fight this tiny fine to the end?
There is precedent for dumb stuff like that. In 2009, OSHA issued a $7,000 citation to Walmart for the trampling death of one if its employees on Black Friday. Walmart fought the citation for years. An Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) upheld OSHA’s citation in 2011, but not before Walmart had already spent over $2 million on legal fees in an effort to vacate the violation. (OSHA devoted more than 4,700 hours of legal work in response to the $7,000.00 fine.)
But Walmart wasn’t finished. It appealed the ALJ judgement to the full Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission, which can take years to decide. The giant company finally decided to drop its appeal in 2015.
We may be just at the beginning of the Elon-OSHA saga. And the whole thing makes workers, unions and OSHA observers a bit nervous. We’ve seen DOGE illegally destroying government agencies, falsely claiming fraud and waste. Will Musk consider a citation by a tiny government agency against the richest man in the world to be unacceptably “wasteful?” And how will this affect OSHA’s willingness to cite Elon’s companies for future violations — or deaths?
And finally, how have we come to the point where we even have to ask these questions?
I inspected what is now Tesla’s Fremont, CA plant for Cal/OSHA in the early 1990’s when it was jointly operated by GM and Toyota. I spent 6 days there examining and documenting ergonomic hazards. Proper walkways demarcated by yellow paint or tape was NOT a problem. That demarcated safe walkways seems to be problematic, according to this post, at Tesla’s Texas plant strikes me as bizarre and idiosyncratic.