Thread by @reveal

1/ Sending workers to the hospital in Lyfts. Pushing hurt employees back onto the production line. Steering people away from medical care.

In our latest investigation into @Tesla, medical workers say its factory clinic is unsafe and unethical. revealnews.org/article/inside…

2/ Let’s start at the beginning.

Back in April, @WillCIR and @alyssajperry reported that @tesla prioritized style and speed over safety, undercounted injuries and ignored the concerns of its own safety professionals. revealnews.org/article/tesla-…

3/ Also: Former safety professionals said that CEO @ElonMusk’s distaste for the color yellow and beeping forklifts led to cutting back on those standard safety signals. revealnews.org/episodes/tesla…

4/ Musk and Tesla responded to our findings by calling us …

* An extremist organization
* Rich kids in Berkeley
* Propaganda
* Orwellian (Orwell was a journalist who investigated worker safety).

5/ Yet today’s investigation shows that even as the company pushed back against our reporting, behind the scenes it doubled down on its efforts to hide serious injuries from the government and public.

6/ Today's story focuses on the @tesla factory’s on-site medical clinic.

Former medical staff, alarmed at treatment there, told us the assembly plant has failed to properly care for seriously hurt workers and helped Tesla hide injuries from the government and public.

7/ Doctors there rarely allowed medical staff to call 911. It’s expensive, after all, and it creates a paper trail.

Instead, they insisted that seriously injured workers – even one who severed a finger – be sent to the emergency room in a @lyft.

8/ Meanwhile workers with chest pain, breathing problems or extreme headaches have been dismissed as having issues unrelated to their work, without being fully evaluated or having workplace exposures considered.

9/ At one point, there was a blanket policy to turn away temp workers from the medical clinic, former workers said.

10/ And injured workers – even some who could barely walk – were systematically sent back to the production line without any work restrictions.

11/ Denying medical care and work restrictions to injured workers is good for one thing: making real injuries disappear.

12/ If an injury requires certain medical equipment, like stitches or hard braces, then it has to be counted.

At the clinic, some employees who needed stitches instead got butterfly bandages. Hard braces were removed from the clinic.

13/ And medical assistants, who are supposed to have on-site supervision, say they were left on their own at night, unprepared to deal with a stream of night-shift injuries.

14/ “The goal of the clinic was to keep as many patients off of the books as possible,” said whistleblower Anna Watson, a physician assistant who worked at Tesla’s medical clinic for three weeks in August. She was fired after raising concerns, she said.

15/ Watson is no stranger to this kind of work.

She has treated patients at a petroleum refinery, a steel plant, emergency rooms and a trauma center. But she said she’s never seen anything like what’s happening at Tesla.

16/ We are going to keep on this story.

Get the latest updates by subscribing to our newsletter: revealnews.org/newsletter

If you have a tip, write to @WillCIR. His DMs are open.