> A review by Forbes found 24 investigations by California Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspectors from 2014 to 2018, resulting in fines for 54 violations. These include new penalties that haven't yet hit the national online OSHA database, and they nearly double Tesla's fines over the last five years, to $236,730.
* https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2019/03/01/tesla-sa...
A plant with the degree of _change_ that Tesla has on its product line would likely have a very very dynamic production floor - resulting in more violations.
It also seems that the OSHA rules were not designed for Tesla's unique processes, so many of those violations, if you actually read them, are not relevant to Tesla and have nothing to do with safety.
This problem will go away as their plant process matures and as they are given the opportunity to comment on the next revision of the OSHA automotive plant rules.
Also, there have been no deaths or serious injuries, so it's hard to argue that safety was actually compromised here.
Also, why should OSHA redesign it's rules to fit Tesla's "unique" processes?
And to your last point about injuries: 1. Why should a death or serious injury be the indicator? 2. You're wrong about serious injuries, as a cursory search would show:
https://www.revealnews.org/article/tesla-says-its-factory-is...
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/12/tesla-gigafactory-safety-pro...
One way would be if increased production floor changes increased OSHA inspections. More inspections yields more discovered violations even for a constant background amount of actual violations.
Safety was compromised due to the Heinrich/Bird safety pyramid, or accident triangle:
> It shows a relationship between serious accidents, minor accidents and near misses and proposes that if the number of minor accidents is reduced then there will be a corresponding fall in the number of serious accidents. […]
> The theory was developed further by Frank E Bird in 1966 based on the analysis of 1.7 million accident reports from almost 300 companies. He produced an amended triangle that showed a relationship of one serious injury accident to 10 minor injury (first aid only) accidents, to 30 damage causing accidents, to 600 near misses.[3] […] The numbers used by Bird were confirmed by a 1974 study by A. D. Swain, entitled The Human Element in Systems Safety.[3] The theory was later expanded upon by Bird and Germain in 1985's Practical Loss Control Leadership.[1]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accident_triangle
The more minor things happening, the greater the probability of a major incident happening, leading to greater chances of a death down the road.
The whole point in going hard on the small things is to help reduces the odds of things escalating because it's easy to get sloppy in one's thinking over time, and you can get 'risk creep'.
* https://risk-engineering.org/concept/Heinrich-Bird-accident-...
I'm not familiar with Tesla assembly lines, but my understanding is that they are highly automated with complex robotics. This would be a typical example of a system where many safety risks are systemic and more strongly dependent on design errors than on worker safety behaviours, which is exactly the type of system in which the structuralist interpretation of the Heinrich-Bird pyramid ("reduce the small stuff at the base of the pyramid and the stuff up the top will drop down and disappear") is really inappropriate, as it can reduce attention paid to safety at a system design level.