Dive Brief:
- A group of former Tesla HR professionals alleged that they were either fired or effectively forced to resign after attempting to surface other employees’ race discrimination and retaliation complaints at the company’s Fremont, California, plant, in a complaint filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
- Per the lawsuit, Peloquin, et. al. v. Tesla, Inc., one of the incidents reported by plaintiffs involved a Black employee who received racially charged threats from a White co-worker. An HR employee investigated the incident and recommended that the co-worker be fired, but Tesla allegedly instead forced the HR employee out after firing his supervisor.
- Other plaintiffs claimed they sent emails to high-ranking Tesla managers complaining of an “extraordinarily high attrition rate” of HR professionals at the Fremont facility as well as retaliation against HR employees. These plaintiffs alleged they were similarly fired after making their complaints. Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.
Dive Insight:
The wide-ranging lawsuit concerns a facility that has featured heavily in previous litigation against Tesla. The automaker’s Fremont facility has been the target of both state and federal regulators over the last several years due to allegations of racial harassment against Black employees and retaliation against workers who complained about harassment.
In March 2024, the company settled a nearly decade-long case involving an employee who claimed that he and other Black employees were subjected to harassment by co-workers. Federal juries twice sided with the plaintiff at trial, awarding millions of dollars in damages.
According to the Peloquin complaint, one of Tesla’s HR managers was a “common denominator” in the various claims made by the plaintiffs. They alleged that the manager, the overall HR manager for the entire Fremont facility, “had an irrational fixation on fostering the delusion that the environment and culture at Tesla is one of tolerance and innovation, rather than racism and retaliation.”
One of the plaintiffs, who is a gay man, claimed that the HR manager “unilaterally placed him” in a LGBTQ affinity group for Tesla employees without his permission or consent. When he complained about this decision to a higher-up, the manager initiated an investigation of him and directed a supervisor to terminate him, he alleged.
In all, the plaintiffs alleged unlawful retaliation, disability discrimination, wrongful termination and failure to prevent unlawful discrimination in violation of California state law.
Tesla’s HR department previously was highlighted in a 2022 lawsuit that claimed the department and management of a Nevada worksite ignored obscene and misogynistic music, allowing an alleged sexually hostile work environment to persist. The parties to that case later determined that an arbitration agreement applied to the dispute.