Elon's recent email[0] to employees in response to higher injury claims in the Fremont factory is probably relevant
[0]:
> “No words can express how much I care about your safety and wellbeing. It breaks my heart when someone is injured building cars and trying their best to make Tesla successful.
Going forward, I’ve asked that every injury be reported directly to me, without exception. I’m meeting with the safety team every week and would like to meet every injured person as soon as they are well, so that I can understand from them exactly what we need to do to make it better. I will then go down to the production line and perform the same task that they perform.
This is what all managers at Tesla should do as a matter of course. At Tesla, we lead from the front line, not from some safe and comfortable ivory tower. Managers must always put their team’s safety above their own.”
I know there was a similar safety push at Anglo Gold mines in South Africa. The biggest policy change was that a board member or C-level officer had to be the one to inform family, in person, of any employee deaths. Suddenly safety was a number one priority, and employee deaths dropped by an order of magnitude.
As for Musk? Well, considering that he's spent time in the past sleeping at the assembly lines to make sure stuff is going well, I don't see him reneging on this.
Doing the task himself on the production line is a key differentiator that separates the rhetoric to being able to have realizations that people on the floor already have had.
Managers may know how to manage, but the best people who know how to do the technical job, and how to do it best are always the folks on the production line.
"relevant"? Sure, it's relevant, but let's dig in a bit. The article presents on the record statements that assert Musk's statement does not reflect Tesla managerial practices and priorities in the factory. So, some possibilities:
1) The article is BS and Musk's statement reflects the real state of Tesla manufacturing-labor principles.
2) Musk's statement and the article are both accurate and work habits will change, which means Tesla will voluntarily reduce output. No worries, they have lots of capital and can afford to slow the rollout.
3) Musk's statement and the article are both accurate but Musk is being undermined by mid-level managers he can't control. Poor hapless ineffectual Elon.
4) Musk's statement is deceptive PR. He is in control and forced to choose between hitting ship targets (widely reported as crucial to Tesla's survival) and reducing worker injuries, he is choosing the former.
It's the opposite of an intimidation tactic. If there are managers who hide accidents, line employees know they can go straight to Musk and a) get the safety issue dealt with, b) get the bad manager fired.
A CEO of Alcoa famously required any injury to be on his desk within 24 hours and some high level executives were fired for not taking it seriously when the information emerged through indirect channels. The ultimate result was dramatically improved safety for ~10,000 employees. Elon Musk is certainly taking a page from Alcoa's playbook here.
That's correlation, not causation. Reporting an injury to a CEO does not reduce injuries, it just keeps the CEO informed.
In Alcoa's case, the safety record improved because the CEO made safety the number one priority over even profits, and this led to a culture shift that examined small inefficiencies and led to improved quality as well as improved safety practices.
Reducing harm requires actually implementing a harm reduction strategy. Informing the CEO of every single injury can tell them when the plan isn't working [as they receive each report], but it also fails to tell them it is working, because they don't necessarily know why they aren't hearing reports.
You don't need to personally receive these reports as a CEO. This is just Musk being a control freak. Usually, CEOs implement policies like "inform me immediately every time X happens" because they don't want to get caught off guard when something bad happens.
I dealt with a similar thing at a previous job, and it definitely instilled fear in a lot of people, but it never addressed the cause of the concern. Churning on injuries to reduce specific causes of specific injuries is not a culture shift, it's reactionary.
I think a harm reduction strategy is being implemented, and only replied to you about that one line because that's the only one you quoted. The full email specified further steps:
1. "Going forward, I’ve asked that every injury be reported directly to me, without exception."
2. "I’m meeting with the safety team every week and would like to meet every injured person as soon as they are well, so that I can understand from them exactly what we need to do to make it better."
3. "I will then go down to the production line and perform the same task that they perform."
There is an implied fourth step that the process will be changed based on this feedback. I agree it should be explicit in this note -- but the Mercury News article does say that the 3 assembly has been changed to be easier for line workers based on feedback from S and X, so presumably that will continue.
He doesn't need to meet with injured people personally (certainly it's nice of him, but not necessary). He doesn't need to personally perform a random employee's task to find out how it should be fixed. He is massively over-investing himself in the minutia.
I originally thought that he was requiring the injured parties report to him directly, but on a second reading that doesn't seem like the case. So I don't think it's an intimidation tactic anymore. I do, however, think that he is nuts.
Gates famously attended meetings about very specific product details when he was running Microsoft. So there's certainly precedent for obsessing about minutia having a positive effect on the product.
Which makes logical sense too. Why are their injury rates higher? Because management isn't doing the right things to lower them. That's because either a) they don't care (which seems unlikely, given that they really need to hit production targets, and injured people can't work) or b) they're ignorant as to the actual causes.
Immersion in "minutia" (aka the actual work experience) is certainly one way to cure ignorance.
In a perfect world, no one would ever get injured and this would take no time whatsoever. By personality investing his time after each injury Musk is encouraging everyone to avoid injuries, and showing this is really important. Theoretically this should make things safer because it brings attention to these problems.
However Musk also demands overtime and says the production will be difficult, so I'm not sure how long it will take for things to improve, particularly for repetitive strain injuries.
Are you claiming that meeting Elon would be intimidating and the 'threat' of that would prevent people from reporting injuries at all?
For anything even remotely serious that seems unlikely to have an impact, if you're injured enough to need medical care I don't think that "management will find out" is going to dissuade you from making whatever reports you need to get medical care.
Or do you mean he is intimidating the managers into taking injuries seriously? In that case, yes, I guess you could call it that. But I definitely support that sort of intimidation.
> and would like to meet every injured person as soon as they are well
It's 'caring theater'. He thinks he is the President meeting with people getting the purple heart for service. Such utter bullshit. [1] [2]
[1] The fact that he says he wants to be personally involved in the process is what puts it over the edge. I mean he is running how many companies?
[2] And to front run any legal or PR issues. Create an emotional block for the harmed to take things a step further. "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer".
Please look past the reasons you have described. What Elon is saying is that he will personally meet the injured workers and hear from them what happened with the process and why the injury happened. Then he'd go back to the process by performing it himself and find the root cause. He will then make sure that these processes are improved so no such incidents happen again.
I read similar stuff in The Toyota Way book where workers kept complaining to the management about poor manufacturing processes leading to the injury and poor quality incidents and then the management made sure these processes are constantly improved (Kaizen).
In both Tesla and SpaceX it's part of the culture that safety worries are elevated to very high levels very quickly. There was one guy (vet, nontechnical something or other) in SpaceX who was fired for abusing this, but what struck me most about the story was how he was in repeated contact with the technical person directly under Musk before he went directly to Musk himself. It seemed like that had all been fine, and he was only fired after refusing to let it go with Musk (plus IIRC he was basically out of his depth with the issue).
Musk is ultraproductive and works very closely with his employees. Tesla only has two factories; it's on a much more manageable scale than something like Toyota.
I'm quite sure he is doing internal PR, keeping up the team morale. It's not so much about caring (aka patronizing), but more about giving workers the feeling that they are all rolling up their sleeves together. IMO it's the only strategy that keeps teams together in times of high stress. People become very sensitive to "boss issues" if the work or workload sucks. To prevent burnout, workers have to feel that they are cared for, and their work appreciated. I'm sure you were in such a high stress situation yourself before - if team spirit stays intact, you feel strong and maybe even euphoric. As soon as things go downhill, you will soon think of bailing out.
One way of making workers feel unappreciated is to run your factory in such a way that more of them are injured than in similar facilities run by your competitors.
> but more about giving workers the feeling that they are all rolling up their sleeves together
Sure and maybe to show his appreciation he will invite all of them to use some of the great things that he gains or has that they don't (material or otherwise) for the herculean effort. They aren't all created equal and his equal we all know that. Would think especially the factory workers on the floor.
And I am a owner and not a worker. So this isn't about the downtrodden or me feeling abused in a similar situation. Hasn't happened. It's about being realistic and quite frankly in all honesty jealousy of someone that can flip such stuff which I was never able to do even if it would benefit me. Couldn't be that dishonest.
Not saying that it isn't an effective technique (your point). It is.
When plants like Nissan's in Sunderland (UK) have worked out how to make well over 500K cars per year incorporating a luxury brand car (Infiniti Q30), a mid range crossover company cash cow (Qashqai) and an electric car (Leaf) safely with a strong track record of keeping workers safe there is simply no excuse for this at all. No worker in modern day manufacturing should be concerned for their safety at work, ever.
I am a fan of Tesla and Musk but this line in the email pasted in by thsowers irks me and signals to the underlying issue:
"Managers must always put their team’s safety above their own"
No Elon, every employee's safety is equal and is more important than your TACT time.
I interpreted that sentence differently: managers are not the ones on the factory floor getting injured. By reporting injuries, they may be concerned for the safety of their career, and think by covering them up they'll avoid black marks on their record.
Potentially what he meant and probably a fairer interpretation. I run a (small) factory and my wife works as an engineer at the aforementioned Nissan plant so I tend to have a less forgiving attitude toward people who seem to disregard worker safety.
I remember when I toured the BAE submarine plant 10 years ago in Barrow in Furness being told that 1 death per month was considered standard and kind of ok in the early days of that plant - terrifying and thankfully not the case anymore.
Yeah, there's really no excuse for the safety record at Tesla's factory. At least the workers seem to be organizing so hopefully things will improve soon.
I know that it is not the norm within the auto industry as it is considered as a competitive advantage, but the safety techniques used in assembly lines should be shared among the manufacturers. It would definitely save lives and injuries.
If you try to get a company off the ground yourself or with a small group of friends - then you might need some crunch time to not burn through your funding before you can sustain it.
But if you are a decade old company employing thousands and doing this sort of startup style crunch time then something is wrong. Don't set deadlines that will require worker burnout and workplace accidents to meet.
If they meet the production targets with greatly increased burnout and accidents then there can't be cake and bonuses, heads must roll.
“We’re building the cars for the future with the work process of the past.” - Tesla employee
Most accidents in manufacturing plants come from repetitive tasks which carry some small degree of risk each time they're done. Loading a stamping machine is the classic example. Those have to be engineered out of the production process. It's about reach limitations and pinch points and guarding, not "safety awareness". It's about finding the places where a simple error once in every million times results in someone losing a finger.
Someone using a machine might do a few thousand cycles in a shift. A million in a year. A "one in a million" accident can be an annual occurrence for each employee. This is why production processes have to be made much safer than one might expect. It's risk times time that gets you.
Tesla is new at this stuff. It takes a while to find all the sharp points in a factory and fix them. It also usually takes outside pressure from a union or OSHA.
I know Musk likes to take risks and push his companies and employees to the brink, but given the massive demand for the model 3, Tesla stock price, and 1.8 billion funding they just got, it seems like they can afford to create better working conditions for their workers.
Tesla has been spending an average of $100 million a week on capital expenses, mostly to manufacture the Model 3, according to chief financial officer Deepak Ahuja.
I spent two weeks at that plant and therefore went through safety training on the first day. It was eye opening to see just how serious-not-serious they treated the whole thing.
The supervisor asked each person to introduce themselves as a way of proving they could speak and understand English, and therefore the training. When a few failed, he gave a lecture about how critical safety training is and that this wasn't the Spanish class, but then simply moved along and eventually graduated everyone.
The class was also full of not so bright people. I'm sorry, I'm not sure the politically correct way of talking about this. But the kind of people I wouldn't trust for a second with my life.
This was my first and only time in a factory so I'm not sure how par that all is for the course.
I'd have to think Tesla sees the "human equation" as being the biggest and/or most unpredictable cost of car manufacturing, and Elon's stated goal of being the world's best manufacturer - with the focus on "building the machine that builds the machine", means they are going to try to automate everything.
If I was an auto worker, I'd be very concerned. I'm not saying auto workers should stop complaining, but the more they complain and try to unionize, the quicker the automation will come about. They're in a catch-22
If the automation is inevitable though, it might make sense to unionize if that allows you to maximize the your wages in the short term. The limiting factor of automation is how much capital can be put towards research and implementation and if they have to pay their workers higher wages then there would be less capital to do so and that would actually slow the march towards automation. That being said, I'm not sure modern unions are more about actually helping employees have a collective bargaining chip than they are about enriching the people leading the organizations that are in the business of unionization.
I wonder if, in some place like India, could all of the floppy parts be left to small businesses and local shops? Automated cars would deliver themselves to customers, with utilitarian interiors and utilitarian race-inspired webbing and harnesses, then be driven by the new owner to a customizing shop. I understand that trucks are sold somewhat like this, minus the automation.
Many things can work; fewer things work at scale; even fewer things make financial sense at scale.
Your idea would be more likely work in a country with fewer or no safety regulations. In the United States and Europe there are rules like FMVSS and UNECE rules[0]. Components have to be carefully designed and verified, which would be harder with Mom and Pop shops.
Also, OEMs are able to buy parts at volume, with volume discounts, small shops wouldn't necessarily get those discounts.
Like the other umpteen manufacturers had not done that before. The whole point of fordism was to make everything as simple, quickly repeatable, and eventually automated, as absolutely possible.
There is no "artisanship" in car manufacturing, humans are only required wherever the machines can't reach. That's been the case for a very long time. The only difference is that building production chains that keep workers safe and maintain high output, is not trivial. You have to design production chains with maintainability and accessibility in mind, which means the machinery might end up costing more or taking more to be designed or built. Whenever manufacturers cut corners, that's where workers end up in precarious positions. On top of that, you have to make sure workers get enough rest to be alert on the workplace, and make sure the actual shop floor is completely safe 100% of the time. If you don't do that, because you're too busy trying to hit production targets, that's where accidents happen - regardless of the degree of automation.
> I'm not saying auto workers should stop complaining
I'm not saying this statement is a pre-emptive disclaimer of responsibility towards the paragraph that follows it, but it's exactly that.
> the more they complain and try to unionize, the quicker the automation will come about.
Dude, that's already happened in that sector, it will keep happening, everybody knows it and it has nothing to do with unions. Employment numbers in the sector are nowhere near what they were even just 30 years ago - and not just in cars, all manufacturing is like that. Manufacturers run with the smallest possible skeleton crew that a modern production chain absolutely requires. This is not programming, where you can hire 2 or 10 developers depending on how you feel on a given morning; the production chain as built has X slots over Y shifts, so X*Y people will be hired. When you make a new model, you build a new chain; as technology makes chains better and smarter, X naturally decreases. That's just how it is, there is no "accelerating" the process - it's already as fast as technology makes it possible. Positive variations in employment numbers only come about from expansion, be it in volume or product diversification. Everything else pushes them down.
"liberated from the need to work" is an interesting way to say "unemployment"
The kind of world we have created is one where one must create value in order to have food & shelter. Automation simply funnels more and more of the value created into the pockets of fewer and fewer individuals.
There is a way to use automation to liberate people. It is my life's work (in progress) to figure out how to do this.
To me, this comes when we make automated machines whose purpose is to provide for human survival, and we make those machines open source. Groups of people purchase the machines, and through ownership they receive the benefits of automation rather than an elite ownership class.
I've written several essays on the topic on my website, and have a discussion board where people can discuss the ideas in more detail.
Eventually things will restructure so that the wealth of automation is redistributed. Not 100%, risk takers should still be rewarded. But something like universal income.
The transition will be tumultuous though, as most transitions are.
There were people in the 50s/60s who though that by 2000 we'd be working 30 hour work weeks and retiring by 45. The dream was that automation would help us work less and live more.
Today work is tied to our identity in many countries. "What do you do?" is a question asking about career. If you don't work, you must be lazy.
The solution isn't more jobs to make more things to keep us in the production cycle. Things should last longer. Cellphones should last six years, not two. When Intel posts a loss, it should be taken as a sign they produced chips so well that replacements aren't necessary.
This gets into a much much bigger problem of money, value, debt, consumerism and planned obsolescence. Ultimately if humanity is to survive another 10,000 years, we're going to need some pretty big paradigm shifts.
We're now living in a crashing world. There's too many people, we're consuming resources at an alarming pace, the environment is getting trashed. Things will get ugly before there can be a significant paradigm shift.
They won't be liberated from work, they will just be deprived of their revenue. If there is a famine and you find yourself starving, would you say that you are liberated from the need to eat?
Well then we need to get away from the idea of work and revenue. We need new economies where automation helps us all work less and still survive and contribute things to society. We need less of the consumerism cycle.
Keep in mind Elon is in favor of basic minimum income. My guess would be he would favor Tesla paying a large percentage of any savings achieved through automation to employees who are displaced.
A major benefit of automation is predictability, much higher throughput, and quality - cost savings is icing on the cake.
Having been a grocery checker, I wouldn't worry about automation replacing factory workers any time soon. You can see how quickly automation has replaced human labor while waiting to buy milk at the grocery store.
Or on the other side, our society has people delivering milk directly to the house again. I wonder how long that will be in vogue this time - rehow soon until hipsters start buying cows to personally milk?
Robot workers are usually application-specific, while human people after incredibly general. Moving to robot workers is like replacing GPUs with ASICs - this could be excellent if they are designed for the task. Otherwise, your robots will not perform the task well. For instance, the humans can stop checking groceries and sweep the store on a slow day. Self-check robots cannot hold brooms or move around the area.
> You can see how quickly automation has replaced human labor while waiting to buy milk.
What do you mean by this? I (and most people I know) go through the self-checkout lanes. My trip to the grocery store from entering, selecting my products, purchasing them, and leaving, never causes me to interact with anyone.
Maybe you mean the "behind the scenes" stuff like people stocking the items? I don't know how that works at grocery stores but would be interested to learn.
This is assuming every store has even bought a self-check station. Many haven't, even though they have been "replacing checker jobs" for over a decade. And stores with self-check still frequently require human interaction for most exceptions:
- The bag you brought is too heavy and confuses the bag sensor.
Yeah it's more of a slight difference in scale than complete replacement. Where before you needed 10 checkers for 10 tills, you now need 1 or 2 - and likely increased security to monitor people "accidentally slipping" stuff in their own bags.
automation at checkouts won't replace the cashier any time soon, you're right. you don't need to spend all of that money on automation when there is zero skill and customers can and will do it themselves.
Elon has a long rope to hang himself with because he is generally not perceived as a small minded person.
It's sometimes easy for founders to forget while they can take a lot of pressure on themselves its unfair to expect the same level of performance from others, who may not be as vested as the founders.
This reminds me of a passage from Jack London's The Iron Heel[1], in which the protagonist tells a man who owned the Sierra Mills about an injured worker:
"He lost his arm in the Sierra Mills, and like a broken-down horse you turned him out on the highway to die. When I say ‘you,' I mean the superintendent and the officials that you and the other stockholders pay to manage the mills for you. It was an accident. It was caused by his trying to save the company a few dollars. The toothed drum of the picker caught his arm. He might have let the small flint that he saw in the teeth go through. It would have smashed out a double row of spikes. But he reached for the flint, and his arm was picked and clawed to shreds from the finger tips to the shoulder. It was at night. The mills were working overtime. They paid a fat dividend that quarter. Jackson had been working many hours, and his muscles had lost their resiliency and snap. They made his movements a bit slow. That was why the machine caught him. He had a wife and three children."
"And what did the company do for him?" [the owner's daughter] asked.
"Nothing. Oh, yes, they did do something. They successfully fought the damage suit he brought when he came out of hospital. The company employs very efficient lawyers, you know."
The the owner's daughter doesn't believe him, and goes to the injured worker to see for herself:
"How did you happen to get your arm caught in the machine?" I asked.
He looked at me in a slow and pondering way, and shook his head. "I don't know. It just happened."
"Carelessness?" I prompted.
"No," he answered, "I ain't for callin' it that. I was workin' overtime, an' I guess I was tired out some. I worked seventeen years in them mills, an' I've took notice that most of the accidents happens just before whistle-blow. I'm willin' to bet that more accidents happens in the hour before whistle-blow than in all the rest of the day. A man ain't so quick after workin' steady for hours. I've seen too many of ‘em cut up an' gouged an' chawed not to know."
...
With the exception of the terrible details, Jackson's story of his accident was the same as that I had already heard. When I asked him if he had broken some rule of working the machinery, he shook his head.
"I chucked off the belt with my right hand," he said, "an' made a reach for the flint with my left. I didn't stop to see if the belt was off. I thought my right hand had done it--only it didn't. I reached quick, and the belt wasn't all the way off. And then my arm was chewed off."
...
His mind was rather hazy concerning the damage suit. Only one thing was clear to him, and that was that he had not got any damages. He had a feeling that the testimony of the foremen and the superintendent had brought about the adverse decision of the court. Their testimony, as he put it, "wasn't what it ought to have ben." And to them I resolved to go.
A century later and here we are. Lovely book by the way, I highly recommend anyone read it while keeping in mind the era it was written in. It should make you question our social policies, or lack thereof.
Few people are injured when a software sweatshop screws up, at least until the software gets out into the wild and fails a critical purpose. Running a factory with heavy machinery might be a different beast, o ye masters of the office hell hole :-)
I admire the knack Musk has for extracting government subsidies.
However, with all that money one could do better than pay $5/hour to your subcontracted workers in California [1] or have one third higher number of injuries than industry average (this article).
[0]: > “No words can express how much I care about your safety and wellbeing. It breaks my heart when someone is injured building cars and trying their best to make Tesla successful.
Going forward, I’ve asked that every injury be reported directly to me, without exception. I’m meeting with the safety team every week and would like to meet every injured person as soon as they are well, so that I can understand from them exactly what we need to do to make it better. I will then go down to the production line and perform the same task that they perform.
This is what all managers at Tesla should do as a matter of course. At Tesla, we lead from the front line, not from some safe and comfortable ivory tower. Managers must always put their team’s safety above their own.”