However, inspectors found that staff were not required to wear steel-toed shoes, although the rolls of material they had to load into the machine became heavier – increasing from around 36kg to 136kg each.
A worker at the site told inspectors that “safety may be overlooked” because “the company’s goal is to produce as much as possible in a short period of time,” according to the records. The injured worker said that the machine into which the rolls were loaded “was deliberately set incorrectly with the aim of increasing the production rate during the material loading phase.”
The worker, who was not named in the report, told inspectors that the matter had not been addressed and that the company's safety staff “do not have the reading comprehension or general competency to implement the safety plan at the Redmond facility.”
In a separate incident reported less than 24 hours later, an unidentified employee in Redmond was hospitalized with a broken ankle after jumping off a dock during a fire alarm, which inspectors said the company could not have predicted. As a result, SpaceX was not fined.
A Reuters report last year found that worker safety agencies fined the billionaire's rocket company a total of $50,836 for various violations over the past decade.
SpaceX's history of injuries and regulatory problems highlights the limits of worker safety regulation. Fines are limited by law and provide little deterrent to large companies, according to American worker safety experts.
