Several racist slurs allegedly were directed at Black workers at Tesla’s California plant, according to a lawsuit filed against the company.
A single mother was excited to land a job at Tesla. About three years in, she was fired, she said, after complaining that Black workers were frequently called the N-word on the assembly line.
She soon found herself and other Black workers assigned to the most arduous tasks in a corner of the factory co-workers called “the plantation.”
An army veteran was promoted to a fleet manager job. He said he was fired after he complained his boss called him and two Black co-workers “monkeys.”
These three Black former employees described how jobs at the pioneering automaker devolved into personal nightmares due to a pattern of rampant racism and harassment at Tesla California factory.
This led to a lawsuit filed by the California on behalf of more than 4,000 current and former Black workers at the world’s most valuable car company — the largest racial discrimination suit ever brought by the state by number of workers impacted.
The three former employees describe a workplace where racist slurs in English and Spanish were often aimed at Black employees by co-workers and supervisors, as alleged in the lawsuit. They say Tesla segregated Black workers into separate areas, gave them the hardest tasks and routinely denied them promotions.
And they allege that when they informed the company about racist treatment, their complaints went ignored or they were fired.
Tesla disputed the former employees’ accounts, stating that the three workers did not complain to the company about racism and that any discipline they received was the result of their own workplace behavior.
“Race plays no role in any of Tesla’s work assignments, promotions, pay or discipline,” attorneys for the company said in a statement. “Tesla prohibits discrimination, in any form.”
One worker. Monica Chatman landed a job at Tesla in late 2016. Chatman drove a cart and later a forklift on the night shift, hauling parts to assembly lines.
African American workers were routinely assigned the hardest tasks, Chatman said, “the work nobody wanted to do — that was more wear and tear on the body.”
“I was a skinny 115 pounds,” Chatman recalled and was told to do a four-man job by myself?’ Her words were: ‘Do the job or lose your job.’”
She would hear Latino and white workers, and their supervisors, casually refer to Black workers with the N-word. “You would hear n— this and n— that,” she said. ”It was the norm. It was Tesla’s tradition.”
Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, would come through the front of the factory “with his entourage,” Chatman said. “They didn’t want a Black face up there,” she said, adding that Latino colleagues were left up front while Black workers were moved to the back.
Lawrence Organ, Chatman’s attorney in a class-action suit against Tesla, said the company’s allegations are “the same tactic” it has used to counter other complaints by Black workers. In October, a federal jury awarded a worker $137 million after finding the company turned a blind eye to racial taunts and offensive graffiti.
Next, In 2017, Kimberly Romby she wanted a more stable job.
Tesla hired her as a materials handler, hoisting 40-pound packages of auto parts onto forklifts and carts, and driving them through the factory to assembly lines.
The job entailed six- or seven-day weeks, with 12-hour shift and overtime was mandatory.
Within weeks, she said, two young Latino co-workers began harassing her with homophobic slurs after she mentioned she had a wife.
She says Black workers at the company’s Fremont plant were segregated into a crowded corner of the factory without air conditioning. Men would laugh at her and regularly referred to Black workers with racist slurs in English and Spanish, she said. When she objected, they would say “Shut up, N—.”
She complained to her white supervisor and also to HR, but no follow-up. Tesla said Romby never complained about racial slurs or discrimination.
In March, after Romby had suggested safety improvements on forklift routes that were then implemented, she was honored with a performance award certificate at a staff recognition luncheon.
She said that only made co-workers jealous, and the harassment escalated.
After her complaints to HR, Romby said, she was shifted to a more strenuous route, where she had to lift as many as 100 heavy packages a day without help. Non-Black workers on that route worked in pairs, she said.
On the assembly line, Black workers were given the most arduous jobs, such as installing dashboards, she said.
When, as a result, Black workers caused bottlenecks or mistakes, Romby would overhear supervisors say, “Them N—s over there … they’re lazy.’ But they were working as hard as anyone,” she said. She reported the slur in her complaint to the state.
Workers called Tesla’s factory “the plantation,” and “the slave ship,” not just for the brutal work pace that everyone experienced, but especially because Black workers were routinely segregated into a corner of the factory that lacked air conditioning and work conditions were most crowded, Romby said.
In March 2019, she quit. “I felt like I was forced out,” she said.
Romby’s attorney, said she contests Tesla’s allegations about her behavior, and did so in a March 2018 complaint “where she wrote that she ‘only stood up for herself to be left alone.’”
A third worker, Nigel Jones was 22 when he started working at Tesla.
His first job was simple: keep tanks on forklifts filled with distilled water so they didn’t overheat. At first, he said, “I loved working there, I’m a people person, I love talking to people, and our job was essential because if the equipment goes down, the factory’s not running.”
He did pick up on some ominous overtones as he moved around the factory. He’d overhear white supervisors berate Black, Asian and Latino workers, often directing the N-word at Black employees. “Things like, ‘Tell that N— to get over here.”
When he asked fellow Black workers about it, they told him to think twice about complaining, because, he had been told, those who had taken similar complaints to human resources wound up out of a job.
But he liked his boss at the time, the money was good and “I’ve always been the type who says, ‘Hmm, OK. That just happened. Let it go, keep the positive vibes.’”
Jones was promoted to fleet manager, in charge of keeping the factory’s forklifts and carts on schedule, maintained and repaired. Originally hired as a contract worker, the company took him on as full-time employee. He felt he was on his way up. “But when I became full time, things started going downhill very quickly.”
I was young and Black and didn’t get invited to anything. I was outcasted from the get-go.”
Soon after his promotion, his new boss, a white man, started attending the meetings that Jones was excluded from.
His new boss called him and two Black co-workers monkeys, he said. “Once, he walked away saying, ‘Oh you lazy N—s.’ We looked at each other and said, ‘What?’”
He was fired. “They didn’t tell me why, only that I wasn’t a good fit for Tesla, and later I found out it was for safety and attendance violations, which I never once had a write-up for.”