Rivian safety breaches are being ignored by electric vehicle maker, US factory workers say

The complaints allege that the company ignored known hazards and reduced safety resources, forcing some workers to share respirators needed during the manufacturing process. They also describe a range of injuries, including a crushed hand, a broken foot, a slashed ear and broken ribs. A Rivian employee said management fished out damaged electrical cords from the trash and told employees to use them.

Collectively, the filings represent an automaker that has compromised on its rapid scaling to keep pace in the highly competitive electric vehicle space. Some employees described safety protocols that faded as production pressures mounted on its branded plug-in pickup truck.

“There is a certain level of danger involved in manufacturing,” said Don Jackson, one of the employees who filed a complaint, in an interview. “But I expected safety to be given a little more priority.”

In statements to Bloomberg News, a spokesman for Rivian denied the workers’ claims but declined to comment on specific grievances, citing workers’ privacy. The spokesman said the dozen complainants represented just 0.2% of the plant’s 6,700 workers.

“Creating a safe and inspiring environment is a daily practice we expect from every Rivian employee and is part of our operations,” the company said in an emailed statement, adding, “We are not aware of any manager , instructing employees to share respirators. ”

The allegations were filed with the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration over the past two months and target the automaker’s only operating plant in Normal, Illinois. All 12 employees, one of whom has since left Rivian, submitted their grievances in coordination with the United Auto Workers union, which has been trying to organize Rivian’s plant workers for the past year. The UAW shared the filings with Bloomberg News.

Several of the complaints describe hazards that did not result in injury, but which employees feared.

Jackson, who joined the company in March, said in his complaint that “trucks frequently veer into sidewalks” and destroy bulldozers in a way that could lead them to accidentally attack people.

There have been “many near misses” where powered industrial vehicles almost hit people, wrote Kailey Harvey, another staff member. Sensors designed to indicate whether trucks are properly locked sometimes give incorrect readings because they aren’t calibrated to the height of the vehicles, she wrote.

“Concerns about safety dropped”

“It was really great at first,” said Harvey, a former UAW member who joined Rivian last year, in an interview. “Slowly, as production continued to ramp up, concerns about safety began to fade.”

In a short period of time, Irvine, California-based Rivian has recruited an army of engineers, vehicle assembly technicians, and plant managers from legacy automakers like Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co., mostly at its flagship Normal plant. capable of building 150,000 electric vehicles per year. It has also hired top talent from Tesla Inc. and Apple Inc. to scale up and produce electric vehicles for the mass market.

Rivian quickly emerged as a viable contender in the EV market dominated by Tesla and a few legacy automakers, drawing strong interest from A-list Wall Street investors and strategic backers like Ford and Amazon.com Inc. The company’s IPO last November was the sixth largest in US history.

The employee claims “suggest a factory that is far from operational excellence,” said David Michaels, who headed OSHA under former President Barack Obama and is now a professor at George Washington University’s Public Health School. “When workers are injured, it is evidence that factory management is not doing their job to ensure operations are being conducted properly.”

“These reported injuries reflect poor management control of production processes, suggesting that the quality of the factory’s production output will also be subpar,” he added.

Rivian said data it compiles for OSHA shows it is already outperforming its competitors in health and safety. The overall rate of reportable incidents is 2.5 cases per 200,000 hours worked, lower than the industry average of 6.4 cases, the company said. The data also shows that Rivian’s safety performance has improved, with the incident rate down 44% since January, a spokesman said. “Our proactive measures and activities are having a significant positive impact on safety,” said Rivian.

OSHA safety concerns among junior electric vehicle manufacturers – triggered by worker complaints – are not new. In 2018, California regulators scrutinized Tesla’s job security as the market leader dramatically ramped up production of its first mass-market vehicle.

OSHA currently has open investigations into seven complaints at Plant Normal, an agency spokesman said. The regulator previously issued four “serious” subpoenas against Rivian, including three earlier this year that ended in settlements with the agency.

Rivian executives have been briefed on safety concerns

Some workers said they informed management of their concerns before filing complaints with federal authorities. Jackson wrote that he raised safety concerns with numerous supervisors, but they went unheard. “It’s like talking to a wall,” he said in an interview.

One employee, Heather Barschdorf, wrote directly to Rivian Chief Executive Officer RJ Scaringe, concerned that hazards in her work area could affect her pregnancy.

“The fumes in my area make us sick some days even when we’re not pregnant,” she wrote to Scaringe in the Sept. 23 email, viewed by Bloomberg News. Her email said she had had a miscarriage in the past and was at very high risk of having another.

“Many people in my area have contracted flu-like symptoms from exposure to the galvanized metal parts that we weld,” Barschdorf later wrote in an OSHA complaint filed Sept. 30. “I have requested accommodation while pregnant, including ventilation for paint fumes and respirators, on a number of occasions and have been denied.” Her file says she was given a dust mask instead of the right type of respirator.

Scaringe never responded to her email, she said, although a human resources representative referred to it during a later meeting with Barschdorf. The company has not complied with her repeated requests to be moved to another part of the factory, she said in an interview. “Rivian doesn’t listen to us,” she said.

Two weeks after filing her OSHA complaint, Barschdorf suffered a miscarriage. In November she left the company.

When asked about Barschdorf’s report, a Rivian spokesman wrote, “There is no evidence that anything in the work environment caused or contributed to a personal miscarriage” for any employee at the plant.

“We do not comment on open authority cases or situations where litigation may be pending,” the spokesman added. “We value employee feedback and hear employee concerns, and we take appropriate action in each situation.”

Rivian has spent millions of dollars on safety and has a team of more than 70 safety, health and environmental experts, a spokesman said, adding that the company conducts routine training and inspections.

In February, a battery pack explosion caused a fire with flames 10 feet high, according to Harvey’s complaint. “I saw a person set off the fire alarm and nothing happened,” she wrote. After the evacuation, employees were told to go back through the smoke to count employees. “People were coughing and at least one worker had an asthma attack walking through the smoke,” she wrote, adding that since the fire, “no drills or refresher courses have been held for her shift” to know where to go in similar ones situations should turn.

Rivian said it developed a “comprehensive plan to respond to thermal events” after that fire. The company spent $70,000 to acquire a sophisticated gas detector from Finland that can assess indoor air quality after fires, a spokesman said.