Listen to ex-Tesla workers describe Elon Musk's 'production hell' in their own words, from working through a raw sewage leak to sleeping on the factory floor

• Tesla workers described what it was like to work through "production hell" in a new podcast.

• The ex-Tesla workers told The Verge that they worked long hours and faced high pressure to deliver.

• One worker said he had to work through a raw sewage leak, a claim the company has previously denied.

Tesla workers shared their experience working at the automaker during Elon Musk's stretches of "hardcore" production in a recent podcast from The Verge.

In an episode of "Land of the Giants," some former Tesla employees talked about what it was like to see people collapsing from what they said was dehydration — or sleeping on the factory floor after 12-hour shifts.

"What I saw was a lot of people sleeping on the floor, people working 10, 12 hours a day, six, seven days a week," Carlos Gabriel, a former Tesla employee who worked at the company in 2020, said of his experience at the Fremont factory. Musk has also said he slept on the factory floor from time to time.

Gabriel previously told The Washington Post in 2020 that he had been terminated and alleged he'd lost his job after he spoke up about working conditions at the facility during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, Tesla did not comment on Gabriel's claims.

Huibert Mees, chief engineer on the Model S suspension who worked at Tesla from 2009 to 2015 before leaving for Apple, told The Verge the work was "all-consuming."

"You put in the hours and it was weekends and it was 8, 9, 10 at night every night," he said on the podcast.

Denis Duran — a former Tesla employee who started working for the company in 2014 and worked through the 2017 Model 3 production ramp-up that Musk has dubbed "production hell" — said on the podcast that he remembers seeing another worker throw up on the factory floor and faint from dehydration. He also said he recalled a raw sewage leak that some Tesla workers were told to continue working through.

"We couldn't believe that it was almost like past our feet, the sewage and we even asked like 'Are we gonna shut it down? This is ridiculous.'" Duran said on the podcast. "They were like: 'No, no we need to keep running. This is not going to stop a line.'"

The ex-Tesla worker said the company made a pathway that the workers could walk on over the raw sewage. Duran and three other Tesla employees originally told Bloomberg about the incident in 2018. At the time, a spokesperson for Tesla told Insider that the company was not aware of any instances in which managers told workers to walk through sewage.

Duran told The Verge he worked for Tesla for five years before he left the company. During that time, he said he worked through a fire and saw a man's leg crushed by a car on the assembly line. Duran has since become vocal about his experience at the factory and called the carmaker a "modern day sweatshop" in a video he filmed with the More Perfect Union in 2021. He told The Verge Tesla HR was called in to address some of his safety concerns, but "everyone there in the meeting was too terrified to say anything."