Featured Image Credit: credit: SUZANNE CORDEIRO/AFP via Getty Images
Topics: Technology, Amazon, Tesla, Robotics
Chelsea Connor
Topics: Technology, Amazon, Tesla, Robotics
Reports have come to light that Tesla employees are ‘seeing increased accidents due to robotic co-workers’ – as they question their overall safety.
Concerns begin to rise after the risk of automated robots in the workplace trigger multiple accident reports.
An attorney helping on behalf of the contact laborers who work for Tesla, told the Daily Mail that there’s evidence of under-reporting of accidents in the workplace and that one in every 21 Giga Texas workers was injured on the job in 2022.
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This followed after a robot allegedly malfunctioned and aggressively attacked a worker, causing him to ‘spill his blood on the floor’ at the Giga Texas Factory near Austin, according to eyewitnesses.
The man was disabling the programming for Tesla robots nearby, when all of a sudden he was pinned down and ‘the robot continued to claw at his back until there was blood on the floor', one witness told technology website The Information.
In an injury report which was submitted it states that the man had a wound on his hand, but claims the engineer did not need to take any time off work to seek medical assistance.
The report, which has little detail about the attack, but describes how a worker suffered a 'laceration, cut, open wound' and the 'cause object' was a 'robot.'
This isn’t the only situation where an engineer has been seriously hurt, as the attorney says surrounding the alleged underreporting within Tesla, includes the death of an employee which occurred in 2021.
Attorney Hannah Alexander said: "We've had multiple workers who were injured 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."
The ‘industry standard’ for accidents-on-the-job is one in every 30 may be involved in some form of accident, whereas in Tesla, one in 21 workers suffered an accident in 2021.
"What I've found — with a lot of the construction workers I've talked to, who've had injuries — is that their injuries haven't been in the report," Alexander said.
"Like the worker who died, Antelmo Ramírez, his death was not recorded," the Austin-based attorney continued, "and the agreement between the county [Travis County] and Tesla — or with, you know, the Colorado River Project, LLC, the entity that Tesla was 'doing business as' here — was very clear.
"They're supposed to report every construction worker injury or death, and not just the injuries and deaths of people directly employed by Tesla, but any construction worker that was operating on the site."
UNILAD has contacted Tesla for a comment.