Rivian Fact Sheet: Unsafe & Unsustainable
Mismanagement at the electric vehicle maker Rivian is putting its workers in danger and its future in doubt.
Just three years ago, Rivian was the world’s third most valuable car company. In the heady days after its initial public offering in 2021, the EV start-up was worth more than Volkswagen. Its market cap was bigger than any of the Big Three.
Since then, Rivian’s share price has plunged more than 90%. Once touted as the next Tesla, which made 1.8 million cars last year, Rivian struggled to make just 57,000 in 2023.
Now a new exposé by Bloomberg about a health and safety crisis at Rivian’s assembly plant in Illinois threatens to send the company’s fortunes falling even further.
Rivian has long been plagued by instability in its executive ranks. The company’s first chief technology officer, an Apple veteran who helped build the iPhone, received gushing press when he was hired in June 2019, but he was gone nine months later.
The company brought in a former Harley-Davidson executive to be chief operating officer in March 2020 and he was out by the end of 2021—just as the Illinois plant was ramping up production. In 2024, more than half a dozen high-level executives have left Rivian, including at least four C-suite executives.
Rivian workers argue that the revolving door in management has led to chaos and injuries on the factory floor. “A lot of people keep saying, well, they’re a start-up, they’re learning…but they’re learning at the expense of someone’s health,” Rivian worker Eric Gordon told the news site More Perfect Union.
Workers at Rivian have come together to change the company’s culture. They are forming a union to make production safer and more efficient so Rivian can last for the long haul. Unfortunately, they’ve met fierce opposition from management. Instead of listening to employees and improving processes, Rivian management has intimidated and threatened workers who speak up. This approach in the plant is not paying dividends for investors.
RUNNING ON EMPTY
In the last two years, Rivian has lost more than $12 billion, and that’s in addition to the $5.7 billion the company burned through in 2020 and 2021.
Rivian did get some good news in June, when Volkswagen announced a $5 billion joint-venture deal to work with the company on software technology. But VW’s initial investment is only $1 billion, and the remaining $4 billion is not assured.
The VW deal could go the way of Rivian’s partnership with Ford in 2019, when the iconic automaker invested $500 million in the fledgling company and announced plans to collaborate on making EVs. But those plans never materialized and Ford sold the bulk of its Rivian stock in 2022.
Rivian has secured government subsidies worth billions, but it’s not clear those deals will provide the lifeline the company needs.
In December 2021, the Georgia Department of Economic Development and a local development authority announced that they had reached a deal with Rivian on a $1.5 billion incentive package to help fund construction of an assembly plant east of Atlanta. Rivian has described it as a “carbon-conscious campus” where the company could build the R2, a new, more affordable EV. By some estimates, the deal could cost Georgia taxpayers around $200,000 per job.
But the deal may never pan out. This March, with Rivian hemorrhaging cash, the company paused work on the project. Even though Georgia had already spent more than $200 million on site preparation and infrastructure for the plant, Rivian said it could save $2.25 billion in capital expenditures by moving production of the R2 from Georgia back to Illinois.
Even as Rivian jilted Georgia, it scored an $827 million incentive package from the State of Illinois to bring R2 assembly back to Normal. The package does require Rivian to maintain operations in Normal for at least 15 years, add 559 new jobs, and retain a minimum of 6,000 jobs at the plant. But the state secured few benefits for workers in that deal. Despite the hundreds of millions Rivian expects to receive, it only has to pay 120% of the average wage for comparable jobs in McLean County, which for production workers is currently $44,300 a year. That’s less than the low wages Rivian already pays production workers and far below union wage standards for the auto industry.
(The UAW Research Department can provide much more detailed information about these and other government subsidies for Rivian.)
IN HARM’S WAY
Though the balance sheet at Rivian is scary, the real horror show is on the factory floor. As the new Bloomberg story reports, workers at Rivian have suffered: “A cracked skull. A foot fracture. A back laceration so severe it required surgery. An amputated finger.” Even though Rivian, with just one factory, has far fewer employees than companies like Ford and GM, it has racked up more serious federal safety violations than any other automaker in the United States since the start of last year.
The UAW has also gathered the stories of Rivian workers, and their accounts of health and safety practices in the plant are alarming:
“SERIOUS HEALTH PROBLEMS” – Addi Zwanzig started working in the paint room at Rivian in July 2023. She was just 19 and had been healthy her whole life. But Rivian put her in a closed booth spraying paint on cars without a respirator. “I’d get home and I’d have Rivian blue coming out of my nose,” Zwanzig says. “I was throwing up paint flecks at night.” Plus, the temperature in the paint booth was stifling. Soon, Zwanzig was having serious health problems. She had trouble keeping food down, rapidly lost weight, and made four separate trips to the hospital.
Zwanzig did get transferred out of the paint booth, but she remained in the paint department where her job was to wipe cars as they came down the line on skids. The company has a nominal rule that workers can’t climb on skids because of the likelihood of injury. But in the paint department, Zwanzig says, group and team leads often told people to do it to make sure the top of the car was properly wiped down.
In late October, one of Zwanzig’s leads told her to climb on a skid, and she told him to put it in writing. He would not, so she left the floor. Zwanzig was charged with work abandonment and so has been unable to get unemployment or workers’ comp. The latter is the real problem, since she’s still having serious health problems and is racking up thousands of dollars in medical expenses her family is struggling to pay.
“SMOKE WAS EVERYWHERE” – Jeff Schaefer, a trim line worker, says Rivian fails to follow many of the most basic safety practices. “Some of things you see here are unbelievable,” Schaefer says. “We had an electrical box that wasn’t properly sealed. If that thing got wet, it could have been catastrophic. A fire, an explosion. And hazards like that are not uncommon.”
The company forgot to swap out an outmoded battery on one of the skids and it caught fire in Schaefer’s area. “We had to get out of there because the smoke was so bad,” Schaefer says. “That smoke was everywhere, acidic smoke, but other people farther down the line were told to stay in their area. They’ve created an environment where they just want people who’ll work there for a year or two and leave.”
Schaeffer says Rivian’s outsourced HR firm, the California-based PeoplePartners, seems to specialize in not giving people the help they need. “If you have a question about your benefits, the PeoplePartners might take four or five days to get back to you. Workers don’t know what their benefits are and just give up. I really want Rivian to work, but it’s do what I say and if you don’t, there’s the door.”
“THIS ISN’T SAFE” – Renee Leonard has worked on the door line at Rivian for a little over two years. “No matter where you are, there are no safety standards,” Leonard says. “On our line, we have an entire station where all you do is heat up butyl and roll it on. It creates a vapor that’s carcinogenic, but they never warned us. We aren’t given any respirators, there’s no ventilation system. People were getting rashes and they didn’t care. You complain about something and it goes nowhere.”
Leonard has a jig at her station workers use to put on door handles. It suction cups to the door, but it’s too heavy for the suction cups that hold it. “In classic Rivian fashion, there was no thought process on how this was going to work,” Leonard says. “I’ve had it come off twice. I had to block it with my hand so it wouldn’t smash into my face.
“I told one of our engineers this isn’t safe and he just started screaming at me. They say it’s a family first company. But it is vastly different inside those four walls. It is honestly just keep working. No matter what, just keep working.”
Though health and safety hazards are the most pressing problem at Rivian, substandard pay is a major issue too. The starting wage for Rivian production workers is just $23 an hour, well below what UAW members make at the Big Three. Up the road at Ford’s Chicago Assembly Plant, a UAW production member starts at $25.12 an hour. While Rivian workers top out at $28 an hour after three years, a UAW member at Ford in December 2027 will make $42.59 an hour with estimated cost of living adjustments. That’s $30,347 more per worker, per year, to bolster the local economy as opposed to lining the already wealthy pockets of Rivian executives.
Even as the company lost billions in 2023, Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe made $14.3 million in salary, non-wage payments, and vested stock awards and options—283 times more than the average Rivian production worker.
A REAL TURN-AROUND PLAN
Despite its troubles, there is a path forward for Rivian. With Elon Musk looking more and more like a Bond villain, former Tesla enthusiasts are seeing Rivian as a socially conscious alternative.
“I really don’t like jerk CEOs,” one Rivian buyer told CNN. And even if Rivian CEO Scaringe makes too much money, he can sound positively woke. Scaringe has said Rivian wants to “inspire people to do more of the things they love, while minimizing our impact on the planet.” That is catnip to the “Elon-phobic car buyers” looking to purchase EVs.
But Rivian’s brand won’t weather many more storms like the new Bloomberg article. What car buyer with a conscience will want to buy an EV made by workers suffering gruesome injuries? And with Americans’ support for unions at historic highs, how will the public react to news that Rivian is fiercely opposing its workers’ right to organize?
Rivian needs to follow the lead of its new corporate partner, Volkswagen. In April, more than 4,000 workers at VW’s plant in Chattanooga voted to join the UAW. The company did not protest the election. Instead, VW issued a joint statement with the UAW saying, “We share many common goals: providing a positive working environment where employees are well compensated for their hard work building quality vehicles and share in the company’s success.”
That is the path forward for Rivian. Its deal with VW shows there is real value in the company, but Rivian’s full value will not be realized until it forges a strong and stable relationship with its workers. Rivian management knows they must rapidly scale up production to reach profitability. But their plans to more than double production by 2027 seem impossible given current conditions in the plant.
In addition to a more stable relationship with its workers, Rivian also needs more stable sources of funding. Gaming one state against another will only get the company so far. In fact, Rivian is still contractually obligated to build its Georgia plant. If the “pause” on the project lasts beyond 2030, the state can ask a court to cancel the deal and seize the Rivian site.
Rivian has been seeking a sizable loan from the U.S. Department of Energy to get the Georgia plant back on track and to help build the R2 and its next affordable EV, the R3. But there are serious concerns as to whether the federal taxpayer should be taking on the risks inherent in Rivian’s low-road management style.
Rivian can play a role in America’s transition to a clean auto industry. But Rivian will not succeed without a union voice for the workers who make it run.
