The Rivian plant in Normal has hired 6,000 people in just the past two years. That staggering growth far exceeds what anyone could have expected when the mysterious startup first came to town asking for millions in tax breaks to reopen and retool the shuttered Mitsubishi auto plant.
Now, six years later, there’s increasing pressure to measure Rivian’s record by more than just its headcount. Some former and current workers tell WGLT the plant is a challenging and, at times, unsafe place to work – despite Rivian’s assertion that its rate of workplace incidents is much lower than the industry average.
Those concerns are emerging as the United Auto Workers (UAW) union – eager to gain a foothold in the electric-vehicle space – escalates its efforts to organize inside Rivian and get workers to unionize, as they were under Mitsubishi.
Early organizing work already is underway inside the plant, where yellow buttons that say “Union Yes!” are popping up on employee clothing. The UAW has a consultant assigned to the plant, and the union is helping workers bring complaints to the workplace safety agency OSHA – and to the media.
“It’s fairly common for safety to be a big issue when people start thinking about what difference could a union make or not. And they’re right to think that, at least in general, statistically,” said professor Gordon Lafer, co-director of the Labor Education & Research Center at the University of Oregon.
Kailey Harvey is a team lead who’s worked at Rivian for 16 months. She’s one who believes having a union would improve safety.
“Coming together as a union and telling them what we want and why we want it, and then being able to have that in writing, that’s a fail-safe in my opinion,” she said.
Safety concerns
OSHA has issued four violations against Rivian so far in 2022, leading to about $24,000 in fines, records show. The violations included training issues related to chemicals and fire extinguishers, and where you can or can’t run cords and cables, records show. OSHA has 11 other pending cases underway at Rivian. WGLT’s request for OSHA records related to those cases was denied because they’re still open.
The UAW provided WGLT with copies of three of those complaints, filed in September and October. Those complaints, plus interviews with a half-dozen current and former workers, allege workplace injuries, lots of close calls involving forklifts and nearby workers, and people getting sick from airborne contaminants. Most recently, Rivian has mitigated bedbugs that were reportedly found on forklifts.
Traffic control – between pedestrians and machinery – in the increasingly crowded plant is among the top concerns among the workers who spoke to WGLT. Anakin Fox, who worked at Rivian for about six months earlier this year, said she and other workers didn’t receive sufficient training before being allowed to drive forklifts.
“This led to there being frequent forklift accidents,” said Fox, who left in July in part to becoming disgruntled about working conditions at Rivian.
Kailey Harvey also drives machinery at the plant.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m going crazy because I’m yelling at these people and telling them, ‘Hey, you need to watch where you’re going.’ And they look back at me and try to give me attitude like I’m in their way. Like, I’m trying to save your life! Please don’t walk behind me,” she said.
Harvey also witnessed an R1T truck catch fire on the line in February. In her OSHA complaint, she said flames were 10 feet high after a battery pack had a thermal event and exploded.
“That was really scary for me,” said Harvey, adding she’s troubled that her shift hasn’t done an evacuation drill since the incident and she doesn’t know where her rallying point would be. (Since that incident, a Rivian spokesperson says they've developed a "comprehensive thermal event response plan, as well as purchased a highly sophisticated piece of equipment designed to sample and quantify contaminants in the air.")
Harvey’s husband, Matt Craig, also works at the plant. He works in stamping, or the shaping of metal used to build Rivian vehicles.
Matt said he was troubled by recent “die falls” in recent weeks, in which a super-heavy stamping die came loose and almost injured workers, shutting down the line for the rest of the night.
“Recently, it just seems like safety is just not a concern,” he said. “It felt like they cared more about the damages to the die than what actually happened. They just kind of carried on.”
Another employee who works in quality control called the safety climate there a “shit show.”
“It’s just a matter of time before someone gets killed,” said the employee, who asked to remain anonymous to speak freely about safety at the plant.
Rivian’s Normal plant and manufacturing support operations shows a rate of 2.59 cases (workplace incidents) for every 200,000 hours worked, according to a Rivian spokesperson, citing Bureau of Labor Statistics data. That’s lower than the national average for comparable employers: between 6 and 6.4 per 200,000.
Rivian uses a “cutting-edge environmental, health, and safety hazard reporting platform that collects safety and other concerns directly from employees on the floor,” the spokesperson said. Rivian says its closure rate is around 80% for these submissions, and the rest “are all fully vetted to determine if they fall into false alarms, changes already in process, or no further action needed.”
Rivian also says its workers have logged about 27,000 hours of safety training in 2022.
“Rivian strives to create a safe environment for all its workers every day. While new challenges arise as hiring and production ramps continue to scale, our commitment to keeping all employees safe and healthy in the workplace is a daily practice we expect of every Rivian employee. It’s baked into our operating procedures, and we communicate regularly with our employees and expect accurate and timely feedback to ensure we are all playing our part in collective safety,” said the Rivian spokesperson.
Workplace culture
Safety is just one piece of what it’s like to work at Rivian.
Rivian is a young company, so a broader workplace culture is still taking shape as its plant added about 250 net people every month the past two years. The company tells new hires – some of whom take a pay cut to come to Rivian, either for its location or benefits – about its five guiding principles, aka “Compass Values.” They include “Ask Why” and “Over Deliver.”
WGLT asked Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe earlier this year about the prospect of unionization. His response: It’s Rivian leadership’s job to create an “incredible work environment.”
“An environment where it’s clean, well-lit. It’s safe, both physically and psychologically. It invites diversity. It embodies respect. Compensation levels are fair. We have repeatable and predictable work schedules. All those things collectively add up to what it’s like to work here,” Scaringe said.
Rivian uses surveys and focus groups to constantly study this issue, he said. Rivian also offers an on-site licensed clinical social worker for employees – which it says is rare in the industry – and a heavily utilized Early Symptom Intervention service that consists of athletic trainers and educators focused on prevention resources, a company spokesperson said.
“We hope to always be in the driver’s seat on driving the employee experience. But ultimately, it’s the employees' choice. Whether they believe we’re doing a good job or not. It’s our responsibility to deliver on that,” Scaringe said.
Rivian says unionizing would lead to “higher employee costs, operational restrictions and increased risk of disruption to operations,” according to its SEC filings. That comes at a time when the company faces enormous pressure to hit production targets and – someday – turn a profit.
Anakin Fox, the former employee, said Rivian’s reputation of being progressive and eco-friendly does not match its workplace culture.
“When you sit down in orientation, they say they take care of their people, so I was expecting to see that. And what I ended up doing was working 12-hour shifts, six days a week. That’s not taking care of your people,” said Fox, who is now working as a union organizer in Ohio.
Current employee Kailey Harvey said she worked 12-hour shifts, six days a week for about nine months.
“I saw my co-workers more than my own husband, and I live with him,” Harvey said.
Some workers say schedule predictability has improved more recently. Rivian also recently added a second shift.
“As we continue to focus on our production ramp, we are also working on stabilizing our shift patterns for employees and new team members joining weekly,” a Rivian spokesperson said.
The clock is ticking. Rivian has set a public goal of making 25,000 vehicles in 2022 – and it will need to increase its record third-quarter production pace by another 40% in the fourth quarter to achieve that.
“There was an air in the plant that we might lose our jobs if we can’t get this going fast enough. And that constant pressure that we were feeling never seemed to alleviate. There was no breath of fresh air,” said Fox.
Others have had a different experience.
“To see someplace go from 1,900 to 7,000 employees was absolutely nuts,” said Andy Peterson, who was hired as a Rivian Guide (basically a customer concierge) in August 2021.
“In the plant itself … just by the number of machines and vehicles that were coming down the line or being worked on each month, I thought no way anything else was going to fit in there. And then things would get reorganized and another line would come on and more machinery would be there. It was like, holy cow. You could feel the energy walking in,” said Peterson.
As a startup, Peterson said his hours could be crazy. But he felt his mental well-being was taken seriously by higher-ups.
“I always felt that everyone listened to me seriously, and I saw change take place based on my feedback on a number of occasions,” said Peterson, who is no longer with the company.
Rivian also faces a pending federal lawsuit alleging sexual harassment in the plant. It’s trying to force that former employee into closed-door arbitration – something a new federal law prohibits.
Is UAW the answer?
Workplace culture and safety issues may present an opening for the United Auto Workers union, which has more than 400,000 active members (not all auto jobs) in North America, but does not currently represent workers at Rivian.
Matt Craig, the employee in stamping, said he’s been part of organizing efforts at Rivian. He was previously a UAW union shop steward at Caterpillar in Pontiac.
“It would be a way to keep management accountable. We can negotiate all of our benefits – wages, retirement, everything. Right now, it just feels like the company can give and take whenever they please,” Craig said.
One benefit is that unions can negotiate safety procedures that go beyond what an understaffed OSHA requires, and there’s often a joint labor-management safety committee that can identify problems before something happens, said Gordon Lafer, the labor expert from the University of Oregon.
“There’s a dramatic difference in safety in union vs. nonunion plants, even just within the auto industry,” Lafer said.
Recent safety complaints about conditions and practices at the Rivian plant are also more common for startup companies, said Illinois State University professor Victor Devinatz, who studies labor history. When there is a push for increased production at a manufacturing plant, workplace injuries are more likely because workers are not used to operating at that speed. He said his own experience working in a manufacturing plant also shows the increased pace can pressure workers to take shortcuts.
"When we had a lot of work to do and there was pressure for us to get it done, fellow workers showed me how to do it in a quicker way, but it was a more dangerous way, and never to tell management about this," said Devinatz.
Devinatz says Tesla also had safety issues early in its production ramp-up period.
Devinatz said the auto industry has a better safety record than the 33% annual injury rate in meatpacking facilities or the 20% injury rate in the construction industry, but it's still manufacturing with a lot of moving parts.
"Heavy manufacturing in whatever setting you are doing, there is going to be some level of injuries," said Devinatz.
Devinatz said many think union organizing campaigns focus on pay and benefits, but some center on safety and working conditions instead. And he said a 1970s workplace death at an International Harvester plant showed that if both the union and the company don't move fast enough on safety concerns, workers can take matters into their own hands.
"To let management know they were upset about this issue, they went on a wildcat strike.," said Devinatz.
He said such impromptu walkouts over safety issues have also happened at coal mines.
Not all Rivian workers see the UAW as a panacea.
A current employee who works in quality control told WGLT that Rivian’s safety record was a “joke” compared with other manufacturers he’s worked for. He asked to remain anonymous as well to speak freely about safety at the plant.
He likes unions, just not the UAW. He pointed to the UAW federal bribery and embezzlement scandal involving former union officials that could lead to a major shakeup in union leadership next month. The employee also said he heard the UAW didn’t treat former Mitsubishi workers well.
"I don’t know if I trust the UAW."Rivian employee who works in quality control
“I don’t know if I trust the UAW,” he said.
It’s unclear whether Rivian workers will vote to unionize. Regardless, this year’s string of OSHA complaints are noteworthy, said Amy Timmerman, a longtime workplace safety professional who now teaches at Illinois State University. OSHA complaints also will sap a lot of time and attention from Rivian’s safety staff, she said.
“This would be a wake-up call that we need to steer the ship. We need to recalibrate here,” said Timmerman, who has created corporate safety programs from the ground up in her career.
OSHA complaints can affect a company’s image, she said.
“Because this can affect their hiring. People will be like, ‘Oh, do I want to work for a company that has complaints and all these injuries?’ It’s already a tight labor market,” Timmerman said.
Even the workers most critical of Rivian say the company has shown signs of being responsive. One employee who asked to remain anonymous said he strongly suspects the company picked up on workers becoming disgruntled this past fall – even informally discussing a walkout or going to the media – and responded with a “town hall” meeting to try and smooth things out.
Kailey Harvey said she’s felt similar responsiveness ever since she was quoted in a widely circulated Nov. 21 Bloomberg article focused on Rivian’s safety record.
“You can already tell the culture for workers has changed since that article came out,” Harvey said. “They’re being more vocal. They’re not as afraid to speak out. It’s a beautiful thing.”
Several employees told WGLT they have hope things can get better – through a union or other means.
“I would have left if I didn’t have hope,” said one worker.
WGLT's Charlie Schlenker contributed to this report.
