It was already known how Elon Musk had it with the employees of X (formerly Twitter). Shortly after he arrived, mass layoffs began and many workers voluntarily left the social network after the South African billionaire announced that “to build a groundbreaking Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will have to be extremely tough. This will mean working long hours at great intensity.”
Now, thanks to an extensive report by Reuters, it has emerged that Musk's demands for his employees to work hard and fast to achieve his vision of being the first to colonize Mars have turned SpaceX, his aerospace business, into a black hole. for job security.
According to this study, since 2014, there have been at least 600 workplace accidents at its various facilities in the United States, resulting in crushed limbs, amputations, electrocutions, head and eye injuries, and even one death.
The records found by the authors include more than 100 workers who suffered cuts or lacerations, 29 with broken bones or dislocations, 17 whose hands or fingers were "crushed" and nine with head injuries, including a skull fracture, four concussions strokes and traumatic brain injury. Among the injured there are also five cases of burns, five electrocutions, eight accidents that resulted in amputations, 12 injuries that involved multiple unspecified parts of the body and seven workers with eye injuries.
To get an idea of the magnitude of the problem of unsafe working conditions suffered by employees at SpaceX, these figures are enough. The 2022 injury rate at the company's Texas manufacturing and launch facilities was 4.8 per 100 workers, six times higher than the space industry average of 0.8. Its rocket testing facility, also in Texas, and where the death occurred, had a rate of 2.7, more than three times the average.
And the rate at its manufacturing plant in California was more than double the average: 1.8 injuries per 100 workers. In 2016, the rate at Florida's Kennedy Space Center was 21.5 per 100 workers, about 27 times the industry average. The facility employed only 50 people at the time and 16 were seriously injured. This has not been an obstacle for NASA, to date, to have paid $11.8 billion to SpaceX as a private space contractor.
Additionally, most of these accidents have not been reported to the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). This agency has required companies, since 2016, to report the total number of injuries that occur at their facilities, but since that date SpaceX has only presented this data in 2021 and 2022.
And SpaceX has paid a very small price for not taking care of its employees. Beyond the reward from the contract with NASA, OSHA and CalOSHA – California's workplace safety agency – have only fined her, between them, a total of $50,836 for the death of one worker and seven serious incidents. But the lack of forcefulness of the Administration to monitor and sanction SpaceX's bad practices does not explain everything.
Elon Musk has set out to not only be the first to take humans to Mars, but to build rockets and spaceships faster and cheaper than anyone else. With this idea in mind and transferring the business model that the billionaire knows best, that of technology, where workers work sitting in front of their computer, at SpaceX – an industrial company – the priority is not safety, but rather working hard and Above all, quickly, which means reducing bureaucracy as much as possible, taking shortcuts and avoiding structured processes and security protocols, which allows them to gain ground on their competitors. SpaceX is already NASA's second-largest supplier, surpassing Boeing.
Basically this comes down to letting the workers and team leaders themselves decide what is safe for them, “which really means there is no liability,” Travis Carson, a former SpaceX welder, explains in the report. who was fired in 2022, after fighting with a superior.
The company defends itself by saying that this is not the case, and that occupational safety is in charge of the IR (Responsible Engineers) who are sufficiently trained in this matter and that, therefore, any accident that occurs is attributable to them and in no case to the company itself.
During the construction of the Brownsville (Texas) plant, where the StarShip is being built, workers slept in the facilities to be able to work 80 hours a week, and Carson himself explains that “some took Adderall, a stimulant used to treat attention deficit disorder,” to be able to endure.
According to managers and employees interviewed in this report, many of these shortcuts were due to the need to satisfy Musk's demands so that everything went faster, even if the deadlines were unrealistic. At the same time, the tycoon himself was walking around the SpaceX facilities firing the flamethrower that another of his companies sold and ordering heavy machinery to be painted black or blue, which, due to security protocols, must always be yellow, because he does not like colors. bright.
