Fremont plant: California accuses Tesla of racial segregation in its most important plant in the US | Economy

Tesla’s problems with US regulators are piling up. The department in charge of monitoring labor relations in California filed a complaint on Wednesday for repeated mistreatment and discrimination against African-American employees at the Fremont plant, the largest of the auto company in the United States. The process, initiated after receiving “hundreds of complaints from employees”, adds to the investigation that road safety authorities opened in December against the company for allowing drivers of half a million vehicles to play video games on navigation screens. while the cars were moving. Tesla disabled this feature under government pressure.

According to the California Department of Labor and Housing Justice, supervisors and managers at the Fremont plant, southeast of San Francisco, often use racist epithets and other insults. According to the authorities of this agency, a person came to count between 50 and 100 of these disqualifications in one day. Offensive graffiti also appeared at the factory that employs 10,000 people.

Department director Kevin Kish called the plant a “racially segregated” workplace and said he had enough evidence to prove it. The discrimination, he said in a statement, shows in job assignments, with workers of color doing more physically demanding jobs and facing harsher punishments and reprimands than their white peers. Pay and promotions are also not equal, creating a “hostile work environment,” according to the agency. The full lawsuit document had not been made public as of Thursday morning.

Elon Musk’s company, which has almost 100,000 workers worldwide, knew that the department had been investigating dozens of complaints from its employees for three years. In an internal blog entry, Tesla undermines the credibility of the local government agency and assures that the alleged mistreatment responds to “associates” and was committed between 2015 and 2019.

“Tesla opposes all forms of discrimination and harassment and has an employee relations team that responds to and investigates all complaints,” says the company, which says it has fired any worker who engages in racist or abusive practices. “Recently, we implemented training that reinforces the company’s requirement that every employee must treat another with respect,” the message says.

The auto giant, which last year overtook Toyota as the most valuable in the market, said in its diversity report that 10% of its workers in the United States were black. The number was reduced to 4% in management positions. In his post this Wednesday, the company ensures that the Fremont plant has a majority of racial minority workers and provides “the best wages in the auto industry to 30,000 Californians.”

Kish’s statement describes a dismal work environment for African Americans. Many of them preferred to quit their jobs rather than continue with “the stress of persistent racist harassment and the possibility of physical aggression with harassers”, in addition to “blatant” discrimination and the null impact that complaints with superiors had.

Tesla affirms that it is not the first time that the Californian institution has investigated accusations of racism. “In each of these accusations they found no misconduct,” says the company, which saw its shares fall 3% this Thursday.

It is not the first time that these types of accusations come to light. Last October, an African-American contractor reported being a victim of racism in his dealings with the company. A federal court in San Francisco agreed with him and awarded him $137 million as a way to repair the damage.

Tesla’s policies require that disagreements between employees be resolved internally and behind closed doors, which prevents many complaints of mistreatment and discrimination from reaching local or federal courts. Elon Musk moved his company’s headquarters from Palo Alto, California to Austin, Texas in 2021, reinforcing a migratory trend of companies and talent that leaves the western giant in search of less regulated land with lower taxes.

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