SWASTIKAS AND NOOSES

Black Tesla Workers Routinely Endured Racial Abuse: Federal Lawsuit

Black employees at the automaker’s California factory said they heard their colleagues use racial slurs and saw racist imagery “too many times to count.”

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is suing Elon Musk’s electric-car maker Tesla for tolerating “widespread and ongoing racial harassment” of its Black employees and retaliating against them when they complained, the agency said Thursday. Since at least 2015, according to the federal lawsuit, Black employees at the company’s Fremont, California plant have had to routinely endure “racial abuse, pervasive stereotyping, and hostility as well as epithets such as variations of the N-word, ‘monkey,’ ‘boy,’ and ‘black b*tch,’” according to the EEOC’s press release. “Too many times to count,” those employees also described being subjected to imagery like swastikas, nooses, references to the Ku Klux Klan, and scrawled threats like “kill black people,” the agency’s lawsuit says. Such racism, according to the EEOC, was “frequent, ongoing, inappropriate, unwelcome and occurred across all shifts, departments, and positions.” Workers who objected to the racist working conditions were allegedly fired, reassigned, or given unsavory work assignments. Tesla, which did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday, has previously denied allegations of the company fostering racism.