Contract workers at Tesla are suing for racial discrimination, saying their supervisors at the electric car manufacturer routinely harassed them with racist epithets and drawings. Owen and Demetric Diaz, a father and son who both worked in the same Tesla factory, describe some really gross abuse:
As he turned the corner, the two African-American men allege in a lawsuit, Owen saw Demetric’s supervisor condemning his black subordinates with curses and slurs: “All you f-cking n-ggers,” they heard him say. “I can’t stand you motherf-ckers.” [...]
In the Diaz lawsuit, both men say they were regularly subject to racist epithets by co-workers and supervisors. Along with slurs, Owen says co-workers told him to “go back to Africa” and drew racist caricatures in bathroom stalls and on bales of cardboard—images of dark-skinned figures with bones in their hair and big lips, captioned with the word “Booo!” He’s kept a photo of one.
The two men complained about their treatment, leading Demetric to be fired and Owen to be demoted. Though as contract workers their paychecks didn’t come from Tesla, they’re arguing that the company was a joint employer responsible for the harassment. And interestingly, Josh Eidelson reports:
Being contract employees may actually be what gives the Diaz lawsuit a public hearing. Like a growing number of companies, Tesla uses employment contracts that require workers to resolve disputes through arbitration. The automaker has invoked such agreements in a series of recent worker discrimination disputes, pulling them out of the public eye.
So the thing that usually makes workers more vulnerable could in this case get them their day in court. Meanwhile, some Tesla workers seeking to unionize—and facing retaliation from the company—are being heard at the National Labor Relations Board.
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