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Tesla's Lawyers Prepare For Class Action Racial Discrimination Suit

I wonder how many Musk tweets will be used as evidence?

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Tesla is really good at infrastructure-level mess-ups. There were the autopilot recalls of 2023 and the Cybertruck acceleration recall of 2024, but don’t let these things fool you into thinking Tesla only has problems with its products. It also allegedly has problems with its workforce! So many, in fact, that a California judge thought it made the most sense to process the disputes as a class action. Law360 has coverage:

Tesla must face a class action by scores of Black workers accusing it of a widespread culture of racial discrimination at its factory in Fremont, California, a state trial court judge has ruled.

In a nearly 60-page decision Friday, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Noël Wise partially granted first named plaintiff and fired Tesla worker Marcus Vaughn’s motion for class certification. She noted that the plaintiffs have estimated the proposed class comprises nearly 6,000 Tesla workers who self-identified as Black or African American.
…

“The approximately 500 declarations in support of and in opposition to this motion suggest that over a period of approximately eight years Tesla workers in the Fremont factory heard the n-word and otherwise experienced conditions that might reasonably be characterized as race harassment,” the judge wrote.

There is usually a meticulously cultivated veil that separates the CEOs of billion-dollar companies from their sad social media lives. Tesla is not one of situations — Elon wears his failures on his sleeve much to the chagrin of his stakeholders and employees. We also know from Musk’s spate of very public firings that the “woke mind virus” propagandist fires anyone harboring opinions he disagrees with. Color me surprised if the culture “DEI is Racism” guy managed to trickle down company-wide doesn’t take too kindly to minorities.

The trial is slated to start on October 14th.

Tesla Must Face Sweeping Race Bias Class Action [Law360]

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Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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