US lawsuit alleges 'rampant' sex harassment at Tesla factory
On Thursday, Jessica Barraza, a production associate at
Tesla’s factory in Fremont, Calif., filed a lawsuit against the company
alleging “rampant sexual harassment” and “nightmarish conditions.” In her first
months at Tesla, Barraza told The Washington Post she experienced near daily
harassment, distressing her to the point that she was forced to take medical
leave with a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder.
“After almost three years of experiencing all the
harassment, it robs your sense of security — it almost dehumanizes you,” she
said.
In her Thursday lawsuit filed in California Superior Court
in Alameda County, Barraza, who’s worked at Tesla for almost three years,
alleges not just verbal harassment — including being described by co-workers as
having a “Coke bottle figure,” “onion booty,” “fat ass,” and “fat ass titties”
— but also aggressive physical touching. She alleges being lifted up by one
male co-worker, and having another insert his leg between her thighs.
Barraza says she filed several complaints with supervisors
and HR in September and October, but told the Post that the company did nothing
to address the harassment. She alleges that one supervisory lead sexually
propositioned her over text, while another told her “maybe you shouldn’t wear
shirts that draw attention to your chest” upon overhearing Barraza complaining
about a male co-worker staring at her breasts. According to Barraza, she had
been “wearing a work shirt provided by Tesla.”
Barraza said the culture of day-to-day harassment and
dehumanization that she and other women workers at Tesla’s Fremont factory
experience can be traced to the top. She specifically cited one tweet in
particular by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, made at the end of last month: “Am thinking
of starting new university: Texas Institute of Technology & Science,” Musk
wrote. The acronym for this university would be TITS, and for anyone who might
try to excuse this as unintentional, Musk doubled down to all but confirm what
he meant in a follow-up tweet.
“That doesn’t set a good example for the factory — it almost
gives it like an … ‘he’s tweeting about it, it has to be okay,’” Barraza told
the Post of the tweets. “It’s not fair to myself, to my family, to other women
who are working there.”
Beyond the tweet in question, Musk certainly has a checkered
history of overt and alleged sexism, ranging from his frequent disparaging of
gender identity and pronouns, to allegations of mistreatment from ex-wives.
In addition to Barraza, the Post spoke to several other
current and former Tesla workers, who described the culture at its Fremont
facilities as “male-driven, retaliatory, and unwelcoming to women.” Another
production associate at Tesla, Alisa Blickman, referenced the factory’s
notoriously demanding working conditions. “I don’t know if it’s the 12 hour
shifts that get to these guys or what it is — they just act like they’ve never
seen girls in there or something,” she said. “You really feel like a piece of
meat in there.”
Nallely Gamboa, a former Tesla production associate, told
the Post that after she reported harassment, she was moved to work in a
different part of the factory, which is a “common pattern,” according to
workers at the plant.
Barraza’s suit comes just after Tesla was ordered last month
to pay $137 million to another employee, a Black man named Owen Diaz who said
he faced a hostile work environment and daily, racist harassment, including use
of the N-word, also at the Fremont plant.
Diaz’s suit alleged that all workers at the company faced an
environment “straight from the Jim Crow era,” and that many experienced frequent
racist harassment without support from supervisors or HR. His lawsuit called
“Tesla’s progressive image” a “facade papering over its regressive, demeaning
treatment of African-American employees.”
An attorney for Barraza told the Post he sees her case and
Diaz’s as rooted in “the same kind of dominance and disparagement and
dehumanization.” But she may face additional challenges to move her case
forward, because Tesla requires employees to sign mandatory arbitration
agreements, which Barraza’s attorneys have said are “illegal and
unenforceable.”
Barraza and Diaz aren’t the only Tesla factory workers or
employees who have recently sued the company for alleged discrimination and
mistreatment—from the company’s persistent union-busting efforts to its notoriously
unsafe working conditions for factory workers, who are paid substantially less
than the national average for auto-workers, these allegations of mistreatment
aren’t exactly surprising.
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