One month after ISHN published its October issue cover story on Tesla’s quest to have the safest factory in the world, Tesla’s safety and health practices were again in the news. On November 5, 2018, the Center for Investigative Reporting published an article, “Inside Tesla’s factory, a medical clinic designed to ignore injured workers.”
The electric car maker was accused by former third-party medical clinical staffers of systematically sending injured workers back to the job to keep as many patients as possible off the injury logs. Among the claims: Access Omnicare, the clinic in the Fremont plant that employs 10,000 Tesla workers turned away temp workers on occasion; chest pain, breathing problems and headaches in some cases were dismissed as not work-related; and some workers injured with lacerations, burns, strains and sprains could not be given work restrictions no matter what.