Charles McCubbin, a Rivian worker who says he was unnecessarily injured on the job and who saw that same work “defeat” his brother, has mixed feelings about the burgeoning company that brought the electric vehicle manufacturing industry to Normal.
By the time he reported a shoulder injury from repeated heavy lifting last February, McCubbin said he had already raised a series of safety concerns to leaders at the company’s sole production plant, only to find them repeatedly dismissed.
“More often than not, there’s times that you bring safety issues to light and it kind of gets swept under the rug. For this instance, I was told that I could either quit, I could get fired if I refused to do it, or I could keep doing it,” McCubbin said in an interview for WGLT’s Sound Ideas. “I was kind of put in a corner.”
A single parent also caring for his aging father, McCubbin continued to do the work he believed could hurt him: Manually lifting bumper after bumper, each weighing well over 100 pounds, and placing them on racks before they moved further down the line.
Eventually, McCubbin ended up on medical leave, reporting injury to his shoulder and upper back. The development frustrated him in part because he felt the situation was avoidable.
“It’s always the same thing. ‘We’ve got to keep the line running. We need to hit our goal.’ Whatever it is, it needs to be about production. That’s what takes first [precedence],” McCubbin said.
Since production started at the plant in 2021, the federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration [OSHA] cited Rivian’s Normal plant with 16 workplace safety violations. By comparison, EV pioneer Tesla received two; Toyota and Honda, Ford and General Motors each did not receive more than 10 among various plants.
McCubbin and several other former Rivian employees told WGLT they believe production demands and employee turnover combined with a lack of training have compromised safety conditions at the plant.
McCubbin said he knows it’s complicated. When Japanese automaker Mitsubishi Motors stopped production in Normal in 2015, the layoffs hit more than a thousand families and the economic loss rippled through the community. That’s not something he wants to see replicated, he said, but he joined others in speaking out about working conditions because something, he believes, must give.

“Hoping that Rivian fails would be a bad thing because those people would have to find other jobs. A lot of these people have put so much work into the place,” he said. “I know that we’re a startup company, but people from this community, as well as Springfield, Decatur … drive an hour-plus to get here and this company just comes in, chews you up and spits you out. I just didn’t like seeing it.”
'They gave us badges and put us to work'
At first glance, the 16 OSHA citations issued to Rivian since 2021 paint a picture of safety lapses at the plant — ranging from failing to provide workers with necessary respirators in 2022 to failing to ensure that proper equipment was used to clear waste (which led to an employee injury) in 2023 to employees being exposed to “crushing hazards” from a crane and “injury while working on and around the forklifts” most recently.
Dawn Ware, a former employee, said she was indirectly hit by a forklift and injured. A forklift driver hit a tool stand near her, she said, causing her to jump backwards and fall. At some point in her fall, her foot got stuck in other equipment, she said.
“I got up and I screamed like bloody murder. Tears just started going because I really messed up my ankle on my foot. They didn’t properly tell me to go to the hospital or nothing, they wrapped it up,” Ware said. “I was in so much pain and I had to walk back to the floor. I had no choice; I didn’t want to lose my job. I needed the income.”
Another former Rivian employee, who asked that his name be withheld, said he watched forklift traffic drive “five or six feet” alongside a woman who appeared to be seizing and was being treated by a medical team — less an anomaly and more business-as-usual.
“They would just zoom by and I mean a foot away from people,” the employee said. “People got clipped with those things all the time.”
It was a stark contrast, the former line worker said, to staff orientation where safety was a main focus.
“When I got down to the floor, that didn’t really seem like that was the case. My group leads didn’t really seem to know. There wasn’t a lot of cohesion between orientation and that,” he said. “When I got down there, it was just kind of throw-you-on-a-line. From the top down, it was really just about production.”
Once, the employee said, a door on the line fell “20 feet and crashed right next to my coworker,” a byproduct he believes is the result of the company declining to shut down that particular line despite it having no safety curtain after a previous one broke.

Goran Dobrotic fell 25 feet while working at Rivian last April. A contractor who’d been sent to Normal for a welding job at the plant, Dobrotic told WGLT he was surprised to begin work nearly immediately after receiving a badge. It didn’t match the expectation he’d picked up from working in both domestic and foreign BMW plants.
“They never gave us a safety course like usually they do in every company — like watch the video for 30-40 minutes and then do a test,” the longtime contractor said. “They just gave us badges and put us to work.”
Dobrotic was assigned to work on flooring high enough that a boom lift was necessary to get him to the site: He said he unhooked from the lift, took two “maybe two steps” to hook himself to another safety spot, but “there was a loose plate and I fell before I [could] hook onto another thing.”
According to a medical evaluation shared with WGLT, Dobrotic fractured multiple ribs and was left with chest pain, knee pain and decreased range of motion in his shoulder from the incident.
Had the area been marked, he said, he might have avoided the fall.
“I regret [taking the job] because first the pay wasn’t even so good and ... it's not like BMW. It’s like some third-world country company, like, they don’t take care of people and they don’t do safety like they’re supposed to do.“
McCubbin, who at one point was a team lead before eventually finding himself demoted, said he watched multiple people get hurt doing inventory.
“Many times you would have to go to these boxes that would say there’s [a number of] pieces of metal: You have to take all of those out by hand. There would sometimes be pieces that are 50-70 pounds and there’s a couple hundred in there and you do that multiple times,” he said. “There actually were a few people that had gotten hurt and I knew a few people that were on leave from that team."
Rivian maintains a different story about its alleged safety violations — one aspect being that the number of OSHA violations alone don’t provide enough context to provide an accurate picture of plant operations.
Not all citations were “serious” — the highest level of violation a workplace can receive that comes with a minimum financial penalty — and some initial citations were downgraded after further investigation. Dobrotic’s fall that triggered an OSHA investigation did not result in any.

“Since January 2023, Rivian has received two serious OSHA citations. Initial citations should not be confused as final citations, and to suggest otherwise is incredibly misleading,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “Our safety record continues to improve and in 2024 we did not have any serious OSHA violations.”
'The past has been hazards'
Theodore Hogan, a certified industrial hygienist and associate professor of engineering technology at Northern Illinois University who also helps companies work with OSHA, agrees that citations provide only a limited scope of insight into a company or manufacturing site.
“OSHA is a punitive system to catch people making mistakes,” Hogan said in an interview with WGLT. “All that OSHA does when they cite somebody is tell them they have to fix the mistake, or the company has to fix it. It doesn’t change the overall structure of safety and how the safety is being managed in the organization.”
Hogan said there’s been a pivot for companies and manufacturers away from reacting to violations toward a “risk-based approach to safety.”
“The past has been hazards: OSHA says, ‘This is a hazard and you have to fix it.’ Hazards are important to take care of, but you need to focus on what causes the most problems and get those taken care of first,” Hogan said. “So it’s more of a quantitative approach to safety, instead of just pointing out this and pointing out that, which often has been the case in the past.”
In a statement to WGLT, a Rivian spokesperson said the company has since pivoted to a similar approach, developing and put into a practice a new “cross-functional root cause analysis process that has further expanded the safety protocols at the plant.”
The company also updated its forklift and tugger training and “retrained nearly 1,000 operators.”
Hogan said some major companies that have worked in conjunction with their workers on overall safety have made “significant impacts on worker health and safety.”
“[General Motors] has funded research on exposure to machining fluids and the like that ended up identifying specific issues that could be addressed and it had an impact on machining fluid use worldwide,” he said. “I think there’s definitely a pattern that I’ve seen of positive outcomes [when the] union and management participate in safety together.”

One difference between the workers at General Motors and Rivian: The latter isn’t a union shop, though organizers with United Auto Workers [UAW] have had their eyes on Rivian for some time.
'RJ's invention is wonderful. But the different people in management?'
Both Contina Gray and Dawn Ware described themselves as being outspoken about the issues they saw or experienced while working at the plant.
They also said they were, at different times, the subject of targeted harassment due to their race.
And both said they were pursuing lawsuits for wrongful termination based on their race, the fact that they brought up valid safety or health concerns and that the company allowed racial harassment against them to continue after being reported.
The firm that both of them said they contacted, Lombard-based Atlas Consumer Law, did not respond to multiple requests for comment from WGLT. That firm also took on the cases of two Black men who also filed suits alleging racial discrimination at the plant.
The racial discrimination suits come in addition to at least two others filed by women who allege they were sexually harassed while working at Rivian and that the company failed to protect them from it.
“I love the place — I think RJ’s invention is wonderful,” Gray told WGLT in an interview. “But the different people that come to [plant] management? They ... mistreat people.”
Gray suggests that the younger age of many workers amid a high turnover rate means they come to the plant without significant experience, which can complicate interpersonal or manager-worker relationships. The group leader that she clashed with, she said, was 29 to her 51.
“They have no experience with people, no experiences with jobs, so they don’t have that common sense to say, ‘Separate me from being a lead with my friends’ or [they’ll] be a group lead and trying to fit in,” Gray said. “That’s why so much is going on.”
McCubbin believes it’s partly “the numbers” — production demands as the company tries to reach profitability — that have driven issues within the plant. He doesn’t want the company to suffer, he said, but he does want it to be different.
“A lot of these people have put so much work into this place. I know one week I put in like 96 hours. That was definitely illegal ... [but] we just worked it. We put in the time it needs to succeed,” he said. “I wish I would have quit back then or gotten a lawyer. I just want people to speak up ... show Rivian that you can’t just do these things.”
Rivian produced 49,476 vehicles last year, down from a hoped-for 57,000 that was complicated by supply chain issues.