Former Tesla employees speak out about hardcore work culture and ignoring worker health and safety to meet output goals in new report

Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, is no stranger to controversy, these days, and Tesla has been embroiled in more than its fair share of workplace-related issues over the last decade or so. In a recent episode of Land of the Giants: The Tesla Shock Wave, a podcast by The Verge, multiple former Tesla employees come forward with detailed allegations of workplace mistreatment, health and safety violations, unreasonably-stressful work environments, and downright abuse.

Many of the allegations levelled at Tesla in the podcast aren't entirely new, but the more detailed descriptions paint a grim picture of a company culture that supposedly consistently prioritised output over worker well-being. 

Among the workers detailing their experience working for Tesla is Huibert Mees, chief suspension engineer for the Model S, with over five years of experience at the company. Mees says that, while he felt like the work he was doing was fulfilling, at first, the consistent late nights over weekends and the aggressive culture became all-consuming.

Mees believes that Tesla would never have made it through the early days if not for the “hardcore” company culture.

A factory worker, Melvin Berry, who worked for Tesla between 2015 and 2016, says that the company had a high turnover rate, specifically because a lot of people couldn't cut it in those days. Berry claims that the long hours and six-day work weeks were mandatory, and that managers in the company used racist slurs to address him and his other colleagues.

In another incident, a sewage leak occurred, and managers instructed factory workers to simply walk through the waste to continue working. There have also been reports of workers becoming dehydrated and exhausted after working twelve-hour shifts. Some Tesla workers even took to sleeping on the floor to get some much-needed rest when they could.

Speaking about the aforementioned health and safety violations, Dennis Duran commented that the dehydration was a common occurrence, and that it was quite shocking for the factory workers to learn that they would have to continue working through an active sewage leak. According to Duran, managers in the factory told him and his colleagues that they had made a pathway through the sewage so that they could continue production.

According to a spokesperson for the non-profit organisation, Workers Defense Project, a number of workers at Tesla's Texas Gigafactory approached the non-profit with complaints about 75-hour work weeks and not receiving proper payment from Tesla for the work they had completed.

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