Electric vehicle maker Rivian now carries the high score in what is, perhaps, the worst ranking imaginable.
A new report by Bloomberg says the company was hit with more “serious” safety violations since early 2023 than any other automaker – despite having just a single plant.
Bloomberg says employees at Rivian’s Normal, Illinois factory have described a veritable danger zone, with workers subject to amputations, broken bones, lacerations, a cracked skull – even one who claimed to have vomited “Rivian blue” after painting vehicles with no respirators.
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The report says Rivian has netted 16 “serious” safety violations from OSHA over the past 21 months – a figure its competitors don’t come close to touching, though many have much larger workforces and more factories.
Behind the data are allegations of a workplace culture that lacks proper safety procedures and training.
Rivian has fired back and, in a statement to EV industry news outlet Elektrek, says that Bloomberg “misrepresented the facts.” Rivian contends that many of the violations were initial and, ultimately, corrected which means they were not filed as “final” serious citations. They also added that the company is “continually improving [its] processes and has not received any serious citations this year.”
And while that may be, Bloomberg pointed out that OSHA, in its attempts to quickly abate hazards, often agrees to downgrade citations in order to avoid litigation and unresolved safety problems. Initial citations, then, still tend to reveal a lot about workplace safety.
For its part, a statement from OSHA at least backed up the company’s improvement efforts by saying that Rivian “has improved their safety and health team and are very cooperative with the OSHA process.”
Rivian has a goal of producing as many as 49,000 vehicles by year’s end – an outlook recently cut by about 10,000 due to parts shortages.
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