According to a recently filed lawsuit, Tesla’s California plant was a hotbed of brutal racism. Black workers were pummeled with slurs daily from managers and supervisors alike. The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH), alleges that thousands of Black workers at Tesla’s Fremont factory were segregated into the most physically demanding positions and forced into the lowest-level contract roles.
The segregated areas where they worked were called the “porch monkey station,” “the slave ship,” and “the plantation,” and that’s not the worst of it. When Black workers complained, they were retaliated against, ignored, denied bonuses, promotions, and other opportunities, the lawsuit reads.
Black workers say many of those who hurled the slurs openly wore racially incendiary tattoos, such as the Confederate flag, and use racial slurs as often as 50-100 times a day,” the suit reads. The suit claims supervisors and managers constantly use the N-word and other racial slurs to refer to them and that swastikas, “KKK,” the N-word, and other racist epithets were etched onto restroom stalls doors, lunch tables, and even factory machinery—which Tesla removed, but at a glacial pace. The workers also said they were paid less, and more often terminated, than other workers.
One worker said supervisors complained about where Black workers were assigned, saying, ‘Monkeys work outside,’ and ‘Monkeys need a coat in cold weather.’ A supervisor pointedly asked one Black worker, ‘Do most Africans have bones through their noses?’ While another worker reported that a group of production leads often laughed at her whenever she walked by them. These leads muttered ‘N****r' or ‘Shut up, N****r’ to her at first. When she started getting awards for her work performance, these leads openly called her these racial slurs.”
Tesla’s billionaire CEO Elon Musk (who is planning to move the company’s headquarters from Palo Alto to Austin, Texas), allegedly advised that Tesla workers should be ‘thick-skinned’ about race harassment. The lawsuit is the largest ever brought by the state for racial discrimination, and claims that the company is moving to Texas to “avoid accountability.”
This latest lawsuit is not the only one. A federal jury in San Francisco ordered Tesla to pay $137 million to one Tesla employee over racial discrimination claims. in 2017, the California Civil Rights Law Group, a Bay Area firm, filed a class-action lawsuit against Tesla on behalf of 1,000 Black workers. The suit is starkly similar to the current DFEH suit. Musk, who grew up in South Africa, requires workers directly hired to sign arbitration agreements in order to keep complaints secret and without an ability to appeal. After the 2017 class-action suit, it also required workers employed hired through its staffing agency to sign agreements waiving their rights to go to court.
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