Rivian employees blame the company for broken hands, broken ribs and broken legs, cut ears at the factory

At least a dozen employees at Rivian Automotive Inc. accused the electric vehicle maker of safety violations at its Illinois plant, according to complaints filed with federal regulators.

The complaints allege the company overlooked known hazards and reduced safety resources, forcing some workers to share necessary respirators during production. They also detailed a range of injuries, including a crushed hand, a broken foot, a severed ear and broken ribs. A Rivian employee said management took the damaged power cables out of the trash and told employees to use them.

Together, the filings depict an automaker that has cut corners as it scales rapidly to keep up in the competitive electric vehicle space. Some employees described safety protocols as fading as production pressure grew on its trademark plug-in pickup.

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

In statements to Bloomberg News, a Rivian spokesman denied the workers’ allegations but declined to comment on specific complaints, citing employee privacy. The spokesman said the complaints represent a small fraction of the 6,700 employees at the plant.

“Creating a safe and inspiring environment is a daily practice that we expect of all Rivian employees and is part of our operating procedures,” the company said in a statement. emailed, adding: “We are not aware of any managers directing employees to share respirators. “

The charges have been filed over the past two months with the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration and target the automaker’s sole operating plant, in Normal, Illinois. All 12 employees, one of whom left Rivian, filed the complaint in coordination with the United Auto Workers union, which has been trying to organize Rivian factory workers over the past year. The UAW shared the file with Bloomberg News.

Some complaints describe hazards that do not result in injury, but which employees fear will.

Jackson, who joined the company in March, said in his complaint that “trucks often enter pedestrian walkways” and iron the racks in a way that could cause them to accidentally hit People.

Kailey Harvey, another employee, wrote: “There have been “many near misses” with electric industrial vehicles that almost hit people. She writes that sensors used to show whether the truck is locked in place sometimes give false results because they are not calibrated to the height of the vehicle.

“At first, it was really great,” Harvey, a former UAW member who joined Rivian last year, said in an interview. “Gradually, as production continued to increase, safety concerns subsided.”

In a short period of time, Irvine, California-based Rivian recruited a team of engineers, vehicle assembly technicians, and plant managers from established automotive names like Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co., mainly at their flagship plant in Normal, capable of producing 150,000 electric vehicles per year. It has also hired top talent from Tesla Inc. and Apple Inc. as part of an effort to scale and produce electric vehicles for the mass market.

Rivian quickly emerged as a possible challenger in the electric vehicle market dominated by Tesla and several older carmakers, attracting particular interest from Wall Street’s list of Class A investors. and strategy backers like Ford and Amazon.com Inc. The company’s initial public offering last November was the sixth-largest in US history.

David Michaels, who led OSHA under former President Barack Obama and is now a professor at George Washington University’s school of public health, said the staff member “proposed an inefficient plant. “If a worker is injured, it is evidence that the plant management has failed to do its part in ensuring that operations are carried out properly.”

“These reported injuries reflect poor management control over the manufacturing process, suggesting that the factory output quality will also be suboptimal,” he added.

An agency spokesman said OSHA is currently investigating seven complaints at the Normal plant. Previously, the regulator had made four “serious” citations against Rivian, including three from earlier this year that ended in agreements with the agency.

‘It’s like talking to a wall’

Some workers said they informed management of their concerns before filing complaints with federal regulators. Jackson wrote that he raised safety concerns with multiple supervisors, but they didn’t listen. “It was like talking to a wall,” he said in the interview.

One employee, Heather Barschdorf, wrote directly to Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe, worried that hazards in her work area could affect her pregnancy. .

“Smoke in my area makes us sick for a few days even when we’re not pregnant,” she wrote in a September 23 email to Scaringe, seen by Bloomberg News. Her email said she had had a miscarriage in the past and was at very high risk of miscarriage.

“Many people in my area have fallen ill with flu-like symptoms from contact with the galvanized metal parts we are welding,” Barschdorf later wrote in the OSHA complaint filed on 30. September. “I have requested accommodation as a pregnant woman including ventilation for paint fumes and respiratory protection several times and have been denied.” Her records indicate she was issued a dust mask in lieu of an appropriate respirator.

She said that Scaringe never responded to her email, although a human resources representative mentioned it during a subsequent meeting with Barschdorf. In an interview, she said the company did not comply with her repeated requests to be moved to a different part of the factory. “Rivian isn’t listening to us,” she said.

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

Asked about Barschdorf’s account, a Rivian spokesperson wrote: “There is no evidence that anything in the work environment caused or contributed to an individual’s miscarriage.” to any employee at the plant.

The spokesperson added: “We do not comment on open agency cases nor any situations where there is potential for pending litigation. “We value employee feedback and listen to employee concerns, and we take appropriate action for each situation.”

A spokesperson said Rivian has spent millions of dollars on safety and has a team of more than 70 safety, health and environmental experts, adding that the company conducts training courses on create and test periodically.

In February, a battery explosion sparked a fire with a 10-foot-tall flame, according to a complaint from Harvey. “I witnessed a person pull the fire alarm and nothing happened,” she wrote. After evacuating, officers were asked to walk back through the smoke to count heads. “Everybody got a cough and at least one worker had an asthma attack while walking through the smoke,” she wrote, adding that since the fire “no further drills or training has been held.” function” for her case about where to go in similar situations.

After that fire, Rivian said, it developed a “comprehensive heat event response plan.” A spokesman said the company spent $70,000 to purchase a sophisticated gas meter from Finland that can be used to assess indoor air quality after fires.