The company could just improve the situation enough that the workers don't want to unionize. Losing your agility isn't a good enough argument to convince people to not negotiate a better situation for themselves when you are literally destroying their bodies.
It's not even like they are acting the same as the rest of the industry. Directly in the article it says that they have much higher injury rates than the rest of the industry. Either make the environment safer or at least give the workers enough equity that they benefit from pushing the company through as well. It's pretty disenguous for a rich guy like Elon to say that this is losing money now, so everyone has to sacrifice, when he's going to reap the benefits of that sacrifice
They are saying Tesla isn’t reporting injuries and then they say Tesla has higher injuries? If they aren’t being reported, then what’s the source of that claim? Do we know for a fact that other companies aren’t also (allegedly) underreporting? Reporting about Ford or GM is far less sexy than Tesla, so there could be less incentive.
Both of those statements can be true. They can have a higher injury rate _and_ be misclassifying injuries to hide the fact that it's even higher than what is known.
Regardless though, employees fight for unions in the US only when it's become really bad. There's such a baseline hatred of unions that you can't casually get one going here just by saying you might be able to get more money. Tesla might not have the capital to impeove things directly but they could at least hand out more equity to the employees so that their incentives aligned.
Did you read the original investigation (the one referred to in the submitted article)? It says quite clearly that Reveal was given data from Tesla's internal tracking system.
> Reveal compared records from Tesla’s internal tracking system, obtained from a source, with the official logs, which were requested by an employee and provided to Reveal.
It's not even like they are acting the same as the rest of the industry. Directly in the article it says that they have much higher injury rates than the rest of the industry. Either make the environment safer or at least give the workers enough equity that they benefit from pushing the company through as well. It's pretty disenguous for a rich guy like Elon to say that this is losing money now, so everyone has to sacrifice, when he's going to reap the benefits of that sacrifice