At SpaceX, worker injuries soar — Reuters documented at least 600 previously unreported workplace injuries at rocket company: crushed limbs, amputations, electrocutions, head and eye wounds, and on…::Reuters documented more than 600 workplace injuries at SpaceX. Employees say they’re paying the price for Elon Musk’s push to reach Mars at breakneck speed.
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It was hardly the last serious accident at SpaceX. Since LeBlanc’s death in June 2014, which hasn’t been previously reported, 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.
Holy shit… So what does the Muskrat have to say about this?
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.
Jesus fucking christ. This man is such a caricature of an evil capitalist villain.
Really went from me being like “haha, funny evil capitalist caricature for comedy sake, but this is obviously exaggerated” as a teen to… Well… this. Not to mention oil barons literally putting our future at risk.
I seriously don’t get how some people can be such caricatures. It’s like they’re almost intentionally being evil, even when it’s counter to logic or profit.
But it isn’t counter to logic or profit.
If other people don’t play into what you care about, then they aren’t included in the logical equation. The only goal is personal profit.
And there are some counter examples, but generally CEOs of big companies like this make a shit ton of money. Personal profit. If the company goes under, it doesn’t matter because they’ve made their personal profit.
Shirking safety isn’t conductive to profit though. If am employee dies it doesn’t benefit you. Even if you literally have zero empathy and only care about the bottom line.
A dead employee may cost less than the safety measures that would have protected them.
The truth is that the belief that the caricature was exaggerated is simply PR. They’re actually just as evil as people made them out to be, not less.
Yeah, the older I get the more true this seems.
Which honestly is fucking bonkers to me. This is seriously who we’re letting run the world?
Ok I’ll just inject a little bit of context into those numbers because it smells faintly of a hit piece by Reuters, simply because of the timeframe used and the number of employees spaceX has.
My experience is 30 years in the mining industry, which in that time has become pretty good at managing safety, and reporting on it.
So I’ll dig in a little.
Since 2014, so nine years.
SpaceX employee count : 13000 approximately.
Take about a quarter of that to weed out the paper pushers and company growth since 2014, gives us 3500 or so employees in the line of fire (that is, manufacturing and such).
600 reportable injuries, so about 66 injuries a year. About 5.5 a month on average, over 9 years.
Now those 3500 employees work 60 hour weeks (because: spaceX). So 5.5 injuries and 840,000 man-hours a month. I’m going to round those hours up to 1 million for convenience and to counter the fact that I ditched quite a few people in my initial assessment of SpaceX employees in the line of fire before.
And with a bit of half-assery , I say, “ta-da!” and get 5.5 reportable injuries per million man-hours at SpaceX over the last 9 years.
So, what kind of number is that? Well for tracking this kind of thing normally you would work on a value called that “lost time injury frequency rate” - LTIFR - which is the number of injuries per million hours worked. Oh look, my previous rounding to a million has become very convenient.
Looking at the data that Reuters has given, and my half-assed guesses about employees, spaceX has a long term LTIFR of 5.5. Note that number drops significantly if you use SpaceX’s entire employee base, which as a single entity, they would be quite entitled to use and report.
How does that number stand up against industry norms? 5.5 is middle of the road for manufacturing and construction, generally, but that includes all sorts of manufacturing, from building houses, to steel foundries , to making cars.
The fact that Reuters had to take 9 years of data to make the raw numbers sound alarming enough is a bad smell. They could have calculated LTIFR numbers for each year and figured out a trend and if that was alarming enough, they could have reported on it, like “SpaceX increasingly dangerous to work at!”. The fact that they didn’t makes me suspect it’s a hit piece, although I am willing to accept they didn’t want to get into LTIFR numbers and are dumbing it down for the general public.
Absolutely the number of serious injuries is a concern. Serious injuries are also at the top of a “injury pyramid”, with every layer underneath broader, all the way down to “Ow, I stubbed my toe”. If you have real figures for one layer (like a layer where an employee can’t hide an injury), you can get a good idea of what the other layers should look like.
Judging from Reuters’ numbers, the bottom “minor” layers aren’t getting reported enough, which suggests a lack of safety culture at SpaceX. Although that could simply be from Reuters’ using only public records, which, you know, only keep track of injuries worth keeping track of, so the bottom of that pyramid might only be seen by SpaceX internally.
In conclusion, the reporting by Reuters of raw numbers over long timeframes is suspect. That’s not how things are done in the safety industry, which works with weighted metrics to get results they can compare between companies. Dig in a bit further yourself.
The fact that he’s telling employees to NOT wear bright safety vests because he doesn’t like bright colors is reason enough for me to believe that safety culture at SpaceX is likely absolutely bare minimum or worse. The one employee died because he rode on top of unsecured foam insulation like a fucking idiot with multiple coworkers who encouraged it/didn’t prevent it from happening.
Is the article making it seem worse than what’s “normal” for the space manufacturing industry? I don’t know, and neither do you, as the mining industry is a hugely different environment than space manufacturing. All we have to go off is the evidence provided here, and it doesn’t look good.
If there’s other sources people can provide to shed more insight, that’d be great to get a clearer picture of what’s the normal hazard baseline here.
Yea the article does seem to make it a bigger thing than it actually is. But, the fact that the management or at least the CEO (that also has a major saying in everyday business and is highly respected/feared) openly shows a disrespect for safety measures and laughs them off as annoying, definitely paints a picture. Sure, accidents happen and maybe the numbers aren’t excessively high, but if management doesn’t take them seriously and learn from them and take measures to reduce the risk, then this becomes really concerning
He thinks he’s cool, Gen X crystal pepsi cool.
Hey now, no need to get too crazy here.
This shows that he not only is willing to risk his employees safety for the sake of a “greater good” or at least a profitable business. But the fact that he not only ignores safety practices but actively removes those that are already in place just because they don’t please him aesthetically and he doesn’t want to see them is a whole other level of egoism and carelessness. He really doesn’t give a damn about other people
He’s a man baby, he doesn’t give a fuck about anyone but himself and his own ambition. He thinks paying people means you own them, he’ll just lie and bs his was to more VC money over and over and get what he wants because no matter what, he’s regarded as some kind of ‘genius’
He should be held to account, but won’t.
What did the UN pin the value of a human life at in US dollars? In that sense the ultra wealthy can literally afford death and other workplace accidents.
It’s disgusting, but I can totally see some rich chucklefucks viewing this through that lens.
Back in the day, deaths used to be openly priced into large projects. Freakonomics did an interesting cost analysis on the value of human life using highway speeds vs productivity lost reducing those speeds to save lives. Probably not overly accurate but it was alarmingly low.
These numbers mean nothing without a reference to compare with other similar industries. The article does include a number from other rocket manufacturers(?), though I’d be curious to see how it compares to other private companies, not, like, nasa, haha
Why not NASA? I hope you aren’t implying that private industry should be held to a lower safety standard than government
Not necessarily, but also government spends an inordinate amount of money on extra processes and moves much slower, which could naturally lead to fewer accidents because they’re just doing less, and also the government outsources quite a lot of labor which could include the more accident-prone aspects
I’m gonna be that guy.
Electrocution kills you. Its in the name. I assume based on context they didn’t die.
What’s the appropriate name for an electricity injury?
The medical term is “Shocked really fucking badly”
I would guess an electric shock? Which doesn’t sound as bad as it should, but it should also include the level of burns incurred and if they suffered cardiac arrest or similar.
For example, the employee suffered electric shock from the unsecured 480v power line resulting in second degree burns to their arms and back and were resuscitated after suffering cardiac arrest.
You just described electrocution with way too many words.
Electrocution. OP is wrong, electrocution doesn’t necessarily requires that the person dies. Any severe injury by electric shock is also electrocution. The word might come from the method of executing dead penalties on convicts but it’s not a hard definition.
I suppose “shocked” or “received electrical burns”?
I’ll be that person too: word meanings change, journalists aren’t perfect, and “electrocution” likely had fewer characters than a suitable alternative
Good old Gilded Age again where Uber-wealthy
RailRocketry Barons sacrifice workers to speed along progress and profits.“reach Mars at breakneck speed” - great choice of words there.
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