The State of California Goes After Tesla Amid Racism Allegations
For Black employees at Tesla’s flagship California plant, coming into work could mean being harassed, bullied by a supervisor or finding racist graffiti sprayed on factory walls.
That’s according to a new lawsuit filed by California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH), which alleges that Black workers in the company’s Fremont factory experienced “rampant racism” that the company left “unchecked for years”.
In the suit, filed on 9 February in an Alameda county court in California, the agency says Black workers reported they were subjected to racist slurs and drawings and were assigned the most physically demanding jobs. “Workers referred to the factory as the ‘slaveship’ or ‘the plantation’, where defendants’ production leads ‘crack the whip’,” the agency said in the complaint.
