A new and damning civil rights lawsuit filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleges that automotive giant Tesla did nothing to stop widespread racial harassment aimed at Black employees working at a California plant.
The EEOC states that some Black workers at a plant in Fremont, California, were often called racial slurs, including variations of the N-word, and even witnessed graffiti depicting nooses, swastikas and more racist images drawn across the facility’s high-traffic work areas and even on production lines.
The plant’s supervisors and managers were also witnesses to this conduct but refused to intervene, the suit obtained by Atlanta Black Star details. To make matters worse, human resources employees and managerial personnel who were approached by workers about the “slurs, insults, graffiti, and misconduct” made no effort to address the behavior or penalize the workers responsible. Some of these employees were even terminated, transferred, or experienced a shift in their job duties for reporting the conduct.
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The suit accuses the electric carmaker of violating “federal law by tolerating widespread and ongoing racial harassment of its Black employees and by subjecting some of these workers to retaliation for opposing the harassment.”
Tesla has yet to respond to requests for comment from several major outlets nor has the company released a statement on the lawsuit at this time.
This suit is just the latest in a series of civil actions taken against Musk companies over the past few years.
The Justice Department sued SpaceX for allegedly discriminating against refugees and asylum seekers in its hiring process. In 2021, the carmaker was also the target of a lawsuit filed by half a dozen women who alleged the company fostered an environment of sexual harassment. Just this year, a jury ordered Tesla to pay Owen Diaz — a Black former employee — nearly $3.2 million in damages after finding he faced racial discrimination on the job in 2015. Diaz was initially granted $137 million in 2021, but a judge tossed out that award, ruling it as excessive.
Diaz worked as an elevator operator at the Fremont facility and he sued his former employer after regularly hearing racial slurs on the factory floor and seeing racist graffiti in bathrooms.
The EEOC’s lawsuit details staggering similarities to Diaz’s case, alleging that since 2015, Black workers at the Fremont plant “have routinely endured racial abuse, pervasive stereotyping, and hostility as well as epithets such as variations of the N-word, ‘monkey,’ ‘boy,’ and ‘black b—-.’”
Managers, supervisors, line leads, and production associates engaged in this conduct, according to the legal complaint. One employee even reported that white co-workers and one supervisor’s “preferred pronoun” was the N-word.
“Every employee deserves to have their civil rights respected, and no worker should endure the kind of çracial bigotry our investigation revealed,” EEOC Chair Charlotte Burrows said. “Today’s lawsuit makes clear that no company is above the law, and the EEOC will vigorously enforce federal civil rights protections to help ensure American workplaces are free from unlawful harassment and retaliation.”
The EEOC is seeking “compensatory and punitive damages, and back pay for the affected workers, as well as injunctive relief designed to reform Tesla’s employment practices to prevent such discrimination in the future.”
