It was already known which foot Elon Musk was wearing 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 disruptive Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will have to be extremely hard This will mean working long hours with great intensity."
Now, thanks to an extensive report by Reuters, it has emerged that Musk's demands that his employees work hard and fast to achieve his vision of being the first to colonize Mars have made SpaceX, his aerospace business, a black hole for job security.
According to this study, since 2014 there have been at least 600 workplace accidents at various facilities it has 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 with "crushed" hands or fingers, and nine with head injuries, including a fractured skull, four concussions and a traumatic brain injury. The injured also include five cases of burns, five electrocutions, eight accidents that resulted in amputations, 12 injuries involving multiple unspecified body parts, 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 injury rate in 2022 at the company's manufacturing and launch facilities in Texas was 4.8 per 100 workers, six times higher than the space industry average of 0.8. Its rocket test 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 the California manufacturing plant 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 was occupied by only 50 people at this time and 16 were seriously injured. That hasn't been a hindrance to NASA paying $11.8 billion to SpaceX as a private space contractor to date.
In addition, 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 take place at their facilities, but since that date SpaceX has only submitted this data in 2021 and 2022.
And SpaceX has paid a very low price for not taking care of its employees. Beyond the NASA contract award, OSHA and CalOSHA—California's occupational safety and health agency—have only fined him a total of $50,836 for the death of a worker. and seven serious incidents. But the Administration's lack of force to monitor and sanction SpaceX's bad practices does not explain everything.
Elon Musk has set out not only to be the first to bring 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, in which workers work sitting in front of the computer, to SpaceX – an industrial company – the priority is not safety, but working hard and, above all, quickly, which involves cutting red tape to the maximum, taking shortcuts and eschewing structured processes and security protocols, allowing it to gain ground on its competitors. SpaceX is already NASA's second largest supplier, surpassing Boeing.
Basically this boils down to letting the workers themselves and team leaders decide what's safe for them, "which really means there's no accountability," Travis Carson, a former welder at SpaceX who was fired in 2022 after falling out with a superior.
The company defends itself by saying that this is not the case, and that occupational safety is the responsibility of the IRs (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.
During the construction of the plant in Brownsville (Texas), where the Starship is built, the workers got to sleep in the facilities to be able to work 80 hours a week, and Carson himself explains that "some consumed Adderall, a stimulant used to treat attention deficit disorder", to be able to hold on.
According to managers and employees interviewed in this report, many of these shortcuts were due to the need to satisfy Musk's demands that everything be faster, even if the deadlines were not realistic. At the same time, the tycoon walked around the SpaceX facilities firing the flamethrower that another of his companies marketed and ordered heavy machinery to be painted black or blue, which, due to security protocols, must always be yellow because he doesn't like them bright colors
