Such an interesting dynamic here when discussing EV's and separating the vehicles themselves from their makers. Tesla's are hugely popular in the Bay Area. You see them all over the place. Yet there was another article in the SF Chronicle this week about Tesla and their supposed racism. Now because people claim Tesla has allowed a racist environment to foster at their workplace doesn't necessarily make it true. But for the sake of discussion if it is true, is it possible to separate the good of EV's from the bad of the people making them? (Tesla isn't the only maker of EV's of course but clearly it's the leader.)
Tesla says it doesn’t have a race problem. Hundreds of complaints from workers say otherwise
After two tumultuous years, things at Tesla’s Fremont assembly plant were just starting to get back to normal in 2022. The company’s co-founder and CEO, Elon Musk, was no longer under fire for trying to restart plant operations during a countrywide shutdown, the government was a little more relaxed about letting workers return to the workplace and COVID vaccines were more or less freely available to workers.
The Fremont plant is as important to Tesla as it is to California — it is one of the last remaining bastions of what was once California’s thriving automotive hub. Rising costs have pushed automakers to build plants in Mexico, leaving U.S. manufacturing in a lurch. But Tesla has (more or less) remained firm on its commitment to California, its place of birth.
However, there was trouble in paradise once again in February, when the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing, now known as the Department of Civil Rights, filed a lawsuit against Tesla. The agency said that it had collected “hundreds of complaints” going as far back as 2012 and that it also had evidence of segregation against Black workers.
Tesla issued a statement alleging that the agency’s claims were baseless and that it had previously never found any misconduct against the company. The automaker claimed that the agency had not given it time to respond to accusations of racism.
“A narrative spun by the DFEH and a handful of plaintiff firms to generate publicity is not factual proof,” the automaker said in its statement in February.
Not surprisingly, Tesla took its dissent to the lawsuit a step further, when it filed a petition with California’s Office of Administrative Law in June to pause the lawsuit to settle claims outside the court. Tesla’s petition was denied on Aug. 8, and a judge issued a tentative ruling on Wednesday to deny Tesla’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit. This means Tesla will have to fight the case in court. The company could face billions in damages if the accusations are proven correct.
While Tesla continues to stay exasperated about grave accusations of racist misdemeanor and harassment, this isn’t exactly the first time the company has faced public scrutiny for alleged racial misconduct by its employees. A search of all tweets mentioning “tesla” and “racism” from January 2021 to August yielded thousands of hits, with over 1,300 tweets including both terms in October 2021 alone. While not all of the tweets may be discussing racism at Tesla, the spike does coincide with the outcome of a racial discrimination lawsuit filed by Owen Diaz, an elevator operator who worked as a contract employee at Tesla in 2015 and 2016.
In the lawsuit, Diaz alleged that colleagues subjected him to racial harassment and bias, including calling him racial slurs and drawing swastikas. A jury awarded him $137 million in October in punitive and compensatory damages, but that amount was lowered to $15 million by a U.S. district judge in San Francisco in April. Diaz has since rejected the lowered amount and is awaiting another trial.
Since the Diaz and the state lawsuits, more Black employees have accused Tesla of discriminatory practices. Black workers who formerly worked at the Fremont plant told the Los Angeles Times in March that “Tesla segregated Black workers into separate areas, gave them the hardest tasks and routinely denied them promotions.” The former employees further alleged that some co-workers repeatedly used racial slurs against them.
As for Tesla’s CEO and self-described “Technoking” Musk, accusations of insensitivity around issues faced by minority workers abound. In 2017, the Tesla co-founder wrote an email to employees that to some critics suggested the CEO wanted workers to forgive racist abuse from their colleagues. In 2020, Musk faced strong criticism after announcing Juneteenth as a holiday for Tesla employees but only if they used paid time off. He was also called out that same year for mocking transgender inclusion, infamously tweeting that “pronouns suck.”
With this behavior emanating from the top, repeated allegations of racism and discrimination in other, less public-facing, parts of the company — like the Fremont plant — seem less surprising.
Tesla has been called out multiple times for its apathy toward minority factory workers, but it has repeatedly denied all accusations and claimed that it has responded and investigated all complaints. Yet, the same types of complaints against the company keep coming up. According to the Department of Civil Rights lawsuit, Black workers have “routinely heard” Tesla supervisors at the Fremont plant using racial slurs and some workers were even confronted with racist graffiti. These complaints echo similar claims made by Diaz in his case and other former employees in other lawsuits.
In May and June this year, Tesla laid off the president of the company’s LGBTQIA+ community and a leader in the carmaker’s diversity and inclusiveness activities. The layoffs came on the heels of Musk’s claim that the “woke mind virus” will destroy civilization.
Musk’s comment seems to track with his overall lack of interest in workplace diversity. A search of the founder’s tweets, found no mention of the word “diversity” since Musk, an active user of Twitter, joined the platform nearly 13 years ago. A similar search of Tesla’s Twitter account found that the company has also never tweeted on the subject.
Tesla has made its discomfort with the state’s accusations clear and in the past even threatened to leave California if things go south as the “last remaining automobile manufacturer in California.” But whether Tesla is comfortable with it or not, this sole representative of automakers in the Golden State does have an issue with diversity. Tesla released its first diversity report in 2020, which revealed that about 10% of its U.S. workforce was Black, 21% was Asian American and 22% was Latino — making it a “majority minority” overall. However, 83% of employees in leadership roles at Tesla are men and 59% of the leadership is white. Black employees constitute just 4% of the leadership at the company.
At a time when Tesla should be focusing on boosting its Black workforce — particularly within its leadership — the company is instead busy coming up with arguments to defend the status quo. Tesla’s claim to diversity only seems to pop up when there’s a court case.
Instead of fighting fires everywhere, maybe it’s time the company admits that it has an issue with racism. Owning up will make life easier for current workers, install more guardrails to protect racially diverse employees and reduce the possibility of more court cases. But so far, Tesla seems more ready to fight than acknowledge.
Ankita Mukhopadhyay is a full-time media product manager and part-time freelance journalist, based in South San Francisco.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion...s-it-doesn-t-have-a-race-problem-17401619.php
