By Samuel Messidor
An individual died after suffering cardiac arrest at Tesla’s Austin, Texas “gigafactory” on Thursday, according to the Austin-Travis County EMS who were called to the scene.
The details of the death and the identity of the deceased have not yet been revealed by the state agencies involved, though current and past employees at the factory say on social media that the deceased was an electrician employed by Tesla who died of electrical shock while working in a new construction area meant to house supercomputers. The current and former employees say that, although the plant has safety regulations in place, the workers are pressured by a high work tempo that leads to accidents and injuries.
Monopoly media reports that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is beginning to investigate the death and will not release any details until their investigation is complete.
OSHA investigations are long slogs mired in bureaucracy, and the agency itself is chained by the wider governmental bureaucracy to the point that OSHA only investigates about 1 out of 5 on-the-job deaths reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Even then, worker deaths and injuries on the job are heavily under-reported. A 2020 investigation by various monopoly media outlets found that Tesla in particular misclassified and under-reported injuries at its Nevada and California sites. Even with the under-reporting, OSHA has cited Tesla 63 times for 116 violations in the 5 years leading up to March 2023. This is no surprise considering Tesla’s rabid anti-union activity.
In 2019, a 61-year-old worker died at Tesla’s Nevada factory, though the local medical examiner ruled the cause of death as natural—hypertension and plaque.
In September 2021, Antelmo Ramirez died of heat stroke while working on a construction crew for Tesla’s Austin “gigafactory”. He also was at first diagnosed with hypertension and plaque as the causes of death, though later OSHA investigators found the construction company contracted by Tesla was not providing shade or heat breaks for their workers, and gave the company the maximum fine of $14,502. Killed by Tesla’s contractor after a lifetime of working for a living, Ramirez left behind the only thing he owned to his family—his Chevy pickup truck. There are no Federal standards for worker heat safety, and while some states have their own standards, Texas does not. Texas boasts the most worker deaths per year of any state, with the lion’s share in the construction industry.
In April, Tesla began mass layoffs accounting for 10% of its workforce—including about 2,700 workers in Austin who were abruptly terminated, with some workers not knowing they were laid off until discovering their badges did not work at the company gates. The layoffs came amid the general imperialist crisis and the overproduction in the auto industry—particularly the EV industry—in the US and around the world.
