A judge found that black employees at Tesla's electric automobile factory in Fremont were subjected to years of widespread “racist harassment,” opening the door to hundreds more lawsuits accusing the automaker of mistreatment.
Alameda County Superior Court Judge Noël Wise, in a ruling Friday on a lawsuit brought by black former Tesla employees, cited greater than 500 statements from Tesla employees who swore under oath that they’d experienced or witnessed racist abuse.
Of the greater than 200 Black employees who gave affidavits within the lawsuit, about two-thirds said they’d seen anti-Black graffiti, including nooses, racial slurs and swastikas, and about three-quarters said they’d heard Tesla employees discuss with the Fremont plant as “the plantation” or the “slave ship,” a court filing said. 1 / 4 said supervisors called them using the N-word.
The statements and others that Tesla provided to the court “indicate that over a period of approximately eight years, Tesla workers at the Fremont factory heard the N-word and otherwise experienced conditions that could reasonably be described as racial harassment.” may very well be,” Wise wrote.
Bryan Schwartz, an Oakland attorney who represents current and former black employees within the case, described the judge's statement as “an incredibly significant finding.”
“Have you ever heard of a similar statement made about another employer? “I am not aware of any case where there have been so many victims of harassment over such a long period of time in a single facility,” Schwartz said.
Tesla didn’t reply to requests for comment on the lawsuit and claims in other similar litigation on Wednesday.
Wise's decision follows a federal judge's finding last 12 months of “horrific, pervasive racism” on the factory that makes the corporate's Models S, Y, X and three, and “Tesla's repeated failures to remedy the situation.”
Wise's ruling granted class motion status to the lawsuit but ruled that Tesla couldn’t be ordered to pay damages to the employees involved. The court will now seek to reply three key questions, namely how black employees were treated on the plant and whether there’s currently widespread racist abuse on the factory that should be addressed by a court order against Tesla.
The a whole bunch or hundreds of employees who will want to seek damages from Tesla over their treatment on the factory might want to file separate, individual lawsuits, and the answers to the three questions would “create common facts” to simplify those cases, Wise wrote .
The lawsuit involves individuals who worked on the factory between November 2016 and the May 17 date of the judge's order, Wise wrote.
Schwartz said Wednesday that he expects to start filing those lawsuits this 12 months and that the lawsuits could total as many as 10,000 cases.
The class motion lawsuit, filed by former Tesla employee Marcus Vaughn in 2017 and involving hundreds of current and former black Tesla employees, will now address whether a series of widespread racist slurs occurred on the Fremont plant, whether Tesla knew or must have known about it, and, if Tesla knew about it, whether it did not take immediate and appropriate motion to stop it.
“It is unclear whether Tesla had knowledge of the allegedly pervasive racial harassment at any point in time or became aware of it at any point in time; whether Tesla changed the number of HR personnel responsible for responding to complaints of racial harassment at any point in time; (or) whether Tesla changed how seriously it takes complaints of racial harassment,” Wise wrote.
Wise noted that Tesla has had a written anti-harassment and discrimination policy since October 2011, and that a senior human resources executive at the corporate testified within the lawsuit that the usage of the N-word has been banned on the Fremont factory since no less than 2010 .
Filings within the case indicate that Tesla has required anti-discrimination and harassment training since 2015, and the corporate began a graffiti remediation program around 2017, Wise wrote.
Over the past 12 months, current and former black Tesla employees have described to this news organization alleged racist abuse, including scrawled and spoken racist slurs, dangerous work assignments, unequal workloads, and complaints to supervisors which have gone unresolved or resulted in further harassment.
Tesla submitted statements to the court from 228 individuals who said they didn’t observe harassment at Tesla's Fremont factory or, in the event that they did, that Tesla took “immediate and appropriate corrective action,” Wise's order said.
Tesla, led by CEO Elon Musk, can also be battling several other racism-based lawsuits, including one in 2022 from California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing and one other last 12 months from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Last 12 months, a jury in U.S. District Court in San Francisco awarded black former Tesla employee Owen Diaz $3.2 million in damages in his 2017 lawsuit against the automaker, claiming he endured “daily racist abuse” on the Fremont plant and that coworkers drew swastikas and left racist graffiti and drawings around the ability. The judge in that case, William Orrick, found that Tesla had repeatedly did not stop “horrific, pervasive racism” on the factory.
Tesla said in a 2022 blog post that it “strongly opposes any form of discrimination and harassment” and claims that it has “always disciplined and terminated employees who commit misconduct, including those who use racial slurs or harass others in various ways.”
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