Ok I’ll just inject a little bit of context into those numbers because it smells faintly of a hit piece by Reuters, simply because of the timeframe used and the number of employees spaceX has.
My experience is 30 years in the mining industry, which in that time has become pretty good at managing safety, and reporting on it.
So I’ll dig in a little.
Since 2014, so nine years.
SpaceX employee count : 13000 approximately.
Take about a quarter of that to weed out the paper pushers and company growth since 2014, gives us 3500 or so employees in the line of fire (that is, manufacturing and such).
600 reportable injuries, so about 66 injuries a year. About 5.5 a month on average, over 9 years.
Now those 3500 employees work 60 hour weeks (because: spaceX). So 5.5 injuries and 840,000 man-hours a month. I’m going to round those hours up to 1 million for convenience and to counter the fact that I ditched quite a few people in my initial assessment of SpaceX employees in the line of fire before.
And with a bit of half-assery , I say, “ta-da!” and get 5.5 reportable injuries per million man-hours at SpaceX over the last 9 years.
So, what kind of number is that? Well for tracking this kind of thing normally you would work on a value called that “lost time injury frequency rate” - LTIFR - which is the number of injuries per million hours worked. Oh look, my previous rounding to a million has become very convenient.
Looking at the data that Reuters has given, and my half-assed guesses about employees, spaceX has a long term LTIFR of 5.5. (Note that number drops significantly if you use SpaceX’s entire employee base, which as a single entity, they would be quite entitled to use and report.)
How does that number stand up against industry norms? 5.5 is middle of the road for manufacturing and construction, generally, but that includes all sorts of manufacturing, from building houses, to steel foundries , to making cars.
The fact that Reuters had to take 9 years of data to make the raw numbers sound alarming enough is a bad smell. They could have calculated LTIFR numbers for each year and figured out a trend and if that was alarming enough, they could have reported on it, like “SpaceX increasingly dangerous to work at!”. The fact that they didn’t makes me suspect it’s a hit piece, although I am willing to accept they didn’t want to get into LTIFR numbers and are dumbing it down for the general public.
Absolutely the number of serious injuries is a concern. Serious injuries are also at the top of a “injury pyramid”, with every layer underneath broader, all they way down to “I stubbed my toe”. If you have real figures for one layer (like the one where you need to do paperwork for the government), you can get a good idea of what the other layers should look like.
Judging from Reuters’ numbers, the bottom “minor” layers aren’t getting reported enough, which suggests a lack of safety culture at SpaceX. Although that could simply be from Reuters’ using only public records, which, you know, only keep track of injuries worth keeping track of, so the bottom of that pyramid might only be seen by SpaceX internally.
In conclusion, the reporting by Reuters of raw numbers over long timeframes is suspect. That’s not how things are done in the safety industry, which works with weighted metrics to get results they can compare between companies. Dig in a bit further yourself.
SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 months ago
Really went from me being like “haha, funny evil capitalist caricature for comedy sake, but this is obviously exaggerated” as a teen to… Well… this. Not to mention oil barons literally putting our future at risk.
I seriously don’t get how some people can be such caricatures. It’s like they’re almost intentionally being evil, even when it’s counter to logic or profit.
MrPoopbutt@lemmy.world 11 months ago
But it isn’t counter to logic or profit.
If other people don’t play into what you care about, then they aren’t included in the logical equation. The only goal is personal profit.
And there are some counter examples, but generally CEOs of big companies like this make a shit ton of money. Personal profit. If the company goes under, it doesn’t matter because they’ve made their personal profit.
SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 months ago
Shirking safety isn’t conductive to profit though. If am employee dies it doesn’t benefit you. Even if you literally have zero empathy and only care about the bottom line.
MrPoopbutt@lemmy.world 11 months ago
A dead employee may cost less than the safety measures that would have protected them.
Curiousfur@yiffit.net 11 months ago
The truth is that the belief that the caricature was exaggerated is simply PR. They’re actually just as evil as people made them out to be, not less.
SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 months ago
Yeah, the older I get the more true this seems.
Which honestly is fucking bonkers to me. This is seriously who we’re letting run the world?