Tesla Plant Sees 195% Surge in Time Away Due to Injuries

Tesla Inc.’s manic year of production took its toll on workers. Staff at the automaker’s lone assembly plant in Fremont, California, spent almost three times as many days off the job because of work-related injuries and illness in 2018 as the year before, an indication of just how much strain they were under as they manufactured electric cars at scale for the first time. When taking headcount growth into account, the amount of time away per worker doubled last year, according to Tesla’s report to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, while the overall rate of injuries per hour of work remained roughly the same as in 2017.