Tesla’s alluring tech jobs come at a cost
Anjeanette Damon
Lane Dillon woke up for work with a bad feeling. “Man, I hope nothing happens to me,” he thought.
Dillon had been hired at the Tesla Gigafactory as a temp worker for a subcontractor that installed battery racks at the giant factory outside Reno, Nevada. He was excited about the job. The prestige that Tesla brought to the region had half the state abuzz.
But people had been getting hurt in his unit, he said. Dillon left home that morning with a nagging sense of worry.
Several hours into his shift, Dillon was helping guide a rack into place so it could be bolted into the factory floor. The racks are so heavy it takes a team of four people to maneuver them. He was still pulling his hand out when the team dropped it.
“When it hit my finger and I pulled it out, I knew,” he said. “I was like ‘OK, something’s not there anymore.’ ”
The rack had smashed off the top inch of his right index finger.
Dillon, 24, is a grad student. In 2017, his was one of a string of injuries in the three years that Tesla’s first Gigafactory was being built and put into production.
It’s impossible to tell whether Dillon’s injury could have been avoided because the company never reported it to workplace safety inspectors as required by state and federal law. But oth
“When it hit my finger and I pulled it out, I knew. I was like ‘OK, something’s not there anymore.’ ” Lane Dillon
er challenging impacts of the company’s rapid growth are clear.
From straining emergency responders to exacerbating the region’s critical housing shortage and taxing area roads, Tesla has brought a host of complications. State and local governments were ill-prepared and, because of special tax abatements, had limited financial resources to address them, according to a months-long examination by USA TODAY’s investigative podcast, “The City.”
It all began in 2014, when Nevada won a fierce competition among states for Tesla’s ambitious battery factory project.
Tesla promised to construct a factory bigger than any building in the world, employ thousands of people and generate at least $5 billion in capital investment. Local officials promised lightning-fast construction permits, and state lawmakers rushed through the largest tax abatement package in state history, worth $1.3 billion.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk promised investors the company would make 5,000 Model 3 sedans per week by the end of 2017. The Gigafactory was key to that goal, and it ramped up fast. Employment at the factory jumped from 24 people in 2015 to 7,000 today.
Inside the famed factory
Tucked into the burnt-brown hillsides of the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center about 20 miles east of Reno, the building is a half-mile long and nearly a quarter-mile wide at its widest point.
Inside, the factory is overwhelming to the senses: Giant robot arms swing through the air, driverless forklifts hum and honk around the work sites, workers rush to their stations to keep up with demanding goals.
The building is so cavernous that even the tour guides got lost showing reporters around. Tesla’s vice president for operations, Chris Lister, said he puts in more than 10,000 steps a day. A bathroom break can require a 20-minute round-trip trek.
Everything is on a gargantuan scale. It took more than 8,000 construction workers to build the factory, which churns out millions of battery cells a week.
The Nevada factory is Tesla’s first Gigafactory, a test kitchen of sorts.
“The thing about the Gigafactory 1, is it was really an experiment in, how can we make things as efficient as possible?” Lister said. “And, you know, Gigafactory 10, let’s say, is gonna be 10 times better than Gigafactory 1 from all of the learnings that we capture as we go on.”
All of that experimentation – designing manufacturing lines as they were put into production, for instance, and constructing the building at the same time it was up and running as a factory – created a particularly chaotic environment, according to interviews and public documents.
‘We are requesting EMS’
Getting a full accounting of workplace injuries is difficult. Federal law doesn’t require site-specific injury totals to be reported publicly.
Documents obtained by USA TODAY, including 911 calls and inspection reports from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, show injuries at
the Gigafactory near Reno occur at least three a month.
Tesla has had documented safety problems at its car factory in Fremont, California. As was the case in Fremont, the Gigafactory created substantial work for the state’s OSHA office. Inspectors were on-site at Tesla more than 90 times in its first three years of operation. On average, other factories in the area saw an inspector once in that time period.
Since 2017, Tesla has been fined $26,900 for workplace safety violations at the Gigafactory but has succeeded in getting almost all of the fines reduced or eliminated. Three of the four fines involved amputations.
Even OSHA doesn’t have a complete inventory of workplace injuries. Dillon’s injury, for example, was never reported to the agency, even though state and federal law requires a report for all amputations and injuries that require hospitalization.
In 2018, someone called 911 from the Gigafactory more than once a day, on average, for things such as fights, suicide attempts, DUIs, thefts and drug overdoses. A quarter of those 911 calls were for medical concerns. Those calls also included workplace injuries: finger amputations such as Dillon’s, an electrocution, head injuries from unsecured construction debris blowing off the roof in a windstorm, people falling through holes in the floor.
During a chemical spill in 2017, firefighters were met with “quite a bit of resistance” from Tesla managers, according to the incident report. Tesla supervisors couldn’t immediately provide the name of the chemical that spilled or help firefighters account for people who should’ve been evacuated from the building. Workers ignored caution tape.
Twelve people were treated and released from the hospital for exposure to carbonic acid. No one suffered serious injury.
None of that surprised Chad Dehne, who worked at the Gigafactory for several months supervising teams of temp workers who inspect battery canisters. He was there during a similar incident in 2018.
When a call came in to evacuate, Dehne said, workers scattered. No one seemed to be in charge of making sure everyone made it out safely, he said. As a supervisor, he used his own homemade sign-in sheets to find all of his workers on duty that day.
“Come to find out there was two people that were still inside the building,” he said. “I went inside . ... They were in
there working! And being exposed.”
Because of the tax abatements granted by state lawmakers, Tesla can operate essentially tax-free in Nevada for 10 years and with a substantially reduced tax bill for another decade. Since 2017, Storey County, home to the Gigafactory, has lost out on $65 million in tax revenue.
In other words, Tesla’s not helping pay for the increase in government services it uses.
Take the Storey County Fire District, which is responsible for responding to all of those calls for emergency medical service. Last year, firefighters responded 104 times to the Gigafactory. The fire chief had to open and staff a new fire station to respond to the increased demand.
Although the assessed value of property in his district has spiked 74% since Tesla’s arrival, the fire department’s property tax revenue has grown by only 7%.
‘Tesla helped me’
Tesla declined to make anyone available for an interview but said in a statement that “a few isolated incidents ... are not representative of our overall safety culture at Gigafactory 1.”
“Tesla, our suppliers, and our contractors make up over 10,000 people onsite – the size of a small city,” the statement said. “To report that both personal and work-related medical emergencies over the course of four years make Tesla an outlier is unfair and misleading.”
Although Tesla claimed to have a better injury rate than other factories, it declined to provide any data to support the claim.
Tesla has met all of the requirements set by lawmakers to be eligible for the tax credits. Most of the employees at the factory are Nevada residents, and the company has made $4.9 billion in capital investments, all for its own factory, including the land value.
The average wage of Tesla workers is $30 an hour, four times Nevada’s minimum wage. Many of the jobs there require a skilled workforce, something Tesla is helping cultivate by funding science and engineering programs in schools and paying for college training for workers.
For some, the factory offered a career path that didn’t exist before.
Isabelle West, 19, grew up in Las Vegas. She struggled through high school and couldn’t get into college. Through a program for at-risk students at her school, she got an interview with Tesla.
West started as a production associate making $14.50 an hour and is in a training program at the community college to become a technician. Her tuition is covered by Tesla. She hopes to become an engineer some day, something she said she never would have imagined before.
“Tesla kind of helped me figure out myself,” she said.
The housing crunch
When West arrived in Reno for the job, she hit a major snag: She couldn’t find housing.
“My parents actually went and bought for my graduation gift a little RV trailer-type thing that I could live in,” she said.
But she couldn’t find an open RV spot anywhere near the Gigafactory. West and her parents took to Craigslist, looking for a roommate or affordable apartment. Again, no luck.
Eventually, the program that helped West get the job at Tesla found her housing. She and other workers in her program live in student housing near the University of Nevada-Reno.
Not everyone is so lucky. Donald Thomas, 50, an electrician from Michigan, lives in a tent next to the train tracks near downtown. He moved here to work at the Gigafactory.
After a dispute with his foreman, he said, he lost the job and his housing. He stayed at a homeless shelter for a while, but he said his tools were stolen. Without his tools, he couldn’t find work.
Reno is in the midst of a critical housing shortage. The weekly motels relied on as housing of last resort by 4,000 people are being torn down. Apartment vacancy rates are near zero. And nocause evictions are up 300% as landlords sell out to new landlords, who in turn raise the rent. The median housing price has spiked to $400,000.
The Reno City Council reacted to the housing shortfall by expanding the homeless shelter, creating dorm-style workforce housing and planning for a tiny-home village.
But very little, if any, of that work was done – or planned – before the region went after the Gigafactory project.
“We could have done better ... when it comes to zoning and other things that would encourage more affordable housing, more infill, more multi-family,” said Mike Kazmierski, head of the Economic Development Association of Western Nevada. “It’s time to play catch up.”