author
North Shore
Over the years, Tesla has been plagued by allegations of discrimination at the Fremont factory.
Responsible editor 丨cha Youyin
Edit 丨 Chic
On Tuesday, a total of six female employees filed a lawsuit against Tesla, saying that the problem was rampant in multiple sexual harassment incidents at the company's Fremont plant and other production sites in California.
According to the Washington Post, the six female employees are currently working in Tesla's factory or logistics service positions, with five working in Fremont and one in Southern California. They said the sexual harassment they encountered included intimate touching by colleagues, explicit lewd remarks, and malicious retaliation against the female employees who complained.
01
California, the hardest hit area of the scandal
The plaintiffs said in the litigation materials that compared with the "high-tech" technology corporate image of Tesla's headquarters, the cultural atmosphere of some of its factories is more like some kind of "vulgar and backward fraternal organization."
The alleged sex scandal incidents include—
- After reporting a sex scandal to a superior, male employees retaliated against the victim and even violently removed the other party from work.
- Victims are afraid to speak directly with the HR department due to the involvement of the company's superiors in the harassment. As a result, their workplace experiences suffer from depression and anxiety, which seriously hinders their career progress.
- Frequent gender discrimination and harassment, and female employees trying to protect themselves by buying loose clothes, but these are not long-term solutions. On hot summer days, colleagues had to tie shirts around their waists, trying to hide their backs and prevent male employees from making lewd remarks.
A female employee working at the Fremont Chair Factory revealed that she was harassed to such an extreme extent that she had to pile large boxes around her post to stop male employees in the same workshop from shouting.
The Fremont plant in California is Tesla's only car assembly plant in the U.S., where production of the electric Model S, X, 3 and Y series models is shouldered. According to Tesla's official website, there are more than 10,000 employees here, and the factory has long been the subject of complaints about racial and sexual harassment.
So far, Tesla has not publicly responded to many of the above allegations. But according to a blog post by a former Space X engineer, Musk's SpaceX did not follow up on sexual harassment-related incidents, saying that the company has always had "misogyny" and that this culture has been rampant in recent years.
In court documents and anonymous interviews, many of the women involved in the sexual harassment incident linked their experiences to Musk's "impropriety" behavior.
In the eyes of many people, one of the main reasons why the culture of Tesla factory is so bad is that Musk, as the "head" of the company, often makes bad jokes in public, and some content of social networking sites often contains more obscene "sexual innuendo".
A 38-year-old Tesla worker, who filed a lawsuit in oakland state court, said she experienced a "nightmarish" situation while Tesla was on the night shift, with colleagues and supervisors making obscene comments and gestures to her and other women multiple times almost every week. When she complained to the supervisor and the HUMAN RESOURCES department, they never took any action.
According to the indictment, the woman already suffered from panic anxiety as a result of three years of sexual harassment. Although she has received medication, her mental state is not as good as before.
02
Musk, "the beam is not right"?
A number of Tesla employees, who did not want to be named, reported that whenever Musk posted a sexually suggestive tweet, male colleagues had to "compete to read it", and then followed the trend and talked about meat in public.
The Financial Times also wrote that Musk is trying to run some kind of "bad boy" character on his Twitter. Take, for example, a tweet late October, in which Musk said he was considering starting a university whose name was short for TITS, or "woman's boobs."
For example, Musk has also called several of Tesla's main products , namely the S, 3, X and Y series , "S3XY", which is very similar to the English word "sexy".
In fact, Musk's "poor sense of humor" is two sides of the same coin, and there have been previous criticisms in the American media that Musk's company has a "men's club" corporate culture, which is a common problem of many American high-tech companies.
Former employees serving Tesla's Washington State Service Center revealed that Musk's remarks directly affected the behavior of colleagues .
"Inside Tesla, he often makes all kinds of low-level jokes, which makes the cultural atmosphere of the company's technicians worse."
It is worth mentioning that just as Tesla is facing a sexual harassment scandal, the company is undergoing a trial ruling of up to $137 million. A former Contract Worker at Tesla previously said he experienced racist discrimination at the Fremont plant.
A juror in charge of the case told Bloomberg they hoped to urge Tesla executives to take timely action. As a large company, the most basic measures should not be neglected to protect any employee of the factory.
According to Bloomberg, Tesla has been plagued by allegations of discrimination at the Fremont plant over the years. But in the end, most employees are bound by arbitration agreements.
A black woman suffered a similar experience.
Through an HR agency, she joined Tesla in 2019. In a later corporate lawsuit, she said she was discriminated against on multiple levels of race, gender and age.
According to publicly recorded data, in 2020 alone, California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing received a total of 31 employee complaints alleging discrimination within Tesla related to race, age, gender expression, disability and pregnancy.
In May, a former black employee won a rare $1 million discrimination award in arbitration for failing to prevent his supervisor from addressing him insultingly.
Recently, a federal jury in San Francisco weighed similar allegations against a former contractor who was an elevator operator at the Fremont factory and later won a $137 million lawsuit, the largest racist case in Tesla's history.
03
Eventful autumn
Lately, Musk has been really annoying.
Europe's largest taxi platform, the G7, announced on Tuesday that it would temporarily suspend all of its Model 3 taxis after a serious fatal traffic accident with the company's fleet's Tesla Model 3.
On Saturday night, a Tesla Model 3 taxi in Paris lost control, hitting three pedestrians and a bicycle, followed by a van, killing 1 person, injuring 20 others and putting 3 people in critical condition.
The driver, who was not injured, said after the accident that it was the vehicle's "technical problems" that caused it to accelerate on its own. Three days later, taxi company G7 suspended all Tesla Model 3 vehicles operating under its umbrella for fear of potential accident hazards.
The French newspaper Le Figaro published the G7's statement, as a precautionary measure, and in accordance with the company's internal procedures, the G7 decided to suspend the operation of 37 Model 3 drivers, all equipped with models similar to the accident vehicle, until the inspection results came out.
Tesla's French branch has commented, saying there was no indication that the accident involved a technical flaw in Tesla itself.
But in fact, the safety accident caused by the sudden acceleration is not the first for Tesla.
Last year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) received a petition citing 127 Claims Caused by Tesla, and the agency subsequently launched an investigation into Tesla to verify claims in the petition that a technical flaw caused a "sudden and unexpected acceleration."
But globally, regardless of the circumstances of the accident complaint, Tesla claims that it is a user-side error caused by the misuse of the driver's pedal. There are even cases that show that Tesla has also passed third-party verification, indicating that it is an accident caused by the driver stepping on the accelerator.
G7 has said it will suspend the use of 37 Tesla Model 3 cars in its fleet until police complete their investigation into the case.
As of now, Tesla has not immediately responded to requests for comment from Reuters and French media. On Monday, Tesla analyzed the data of the accident vehicle and preliminarily determined that there was no technical failure in the vehicle at the time of the incident.
During the outage, the Tesla Model 3 owners of the G7 fleet will be fully compensated for the loss of income, while the company is looking for alternatives and keeping in touch with the local government so that drivers can resume travel driving at G7 companies as soon as possible.
C-DIMENSION
WeChat | Automobile Commune C dimension