Tesla needs to pause a federal company’s lawsuit towards the automaker for racial bias towards its Black employees at its Fremont meeting plant.
The electrical car maker, in a submitting in San Francisco federal court docket Monday, accused the U.S. Equal Employment Alternative Fee (EEOC) of speeding to file a lawsuit in September towards Tesla as a part of a “toxic interagency competition” with a California civil rights company that sued the automaker for related causes final yr.
The EEOC’s lawsuit alleges that Tesla violated federal legislation by tolerating widespread and ongoing racial harassment of its Black staff and subjecting some employees to retaliation for opposing harassment. The EEOC’s submitting particulars accounts from Black employees enduring informal use of slurs and epithets resembling variations of the N-word, “monkey,” “boy” and “black bitch,” in addition to racist graffiti calling for violence towards Black individuals, amongst different types of abuse.
The California Civil Rights Division’s claims towards Tesla embrace related examples of harassment from Black employees.
Each instances are in state court docket and declare that Tesla violated California’s anti-discrimination legal guidelines. The EEOC’s lawsuit features a declare that Tesla additionally broke a federal legislation banning office race discrimination and harassment.
Tesla additionally faces a proposed class motion that alleges racial harassment filed by employees in 2017.
The EEOC didn’t instantly reply to TechCrunch’s request for remark.
Tesla’s submitting on Monday says the federal court docket ought to decline to open a 3rd lawsuit till the prevailing instances are resolved. The automaker’s legal professionals argued that prosecuting three instances concurrently will contain “substantial duplication of effort,” create a danger of “inconsistent court rulings” and waste judicial assets.
Tesla is asking on one thing known as the Colorado River abstention doctrine right here, which is a authorized precept that might permit a federal court docket to abstain from listening to a case if there’s a parallel continuing occurring in state court docket that covers the identical points. The purpose behind the doctrine is to keep away from duplicate litigation and enhance extra environment friendly justice.
The turf struggle Tesla refers to in its submitting is between the EEOC and the California Civil Rights Division (CRD), previously the Division of Honest Employment and Housing. The submitting claims that, traditionally, the EEOC and CRD have labored collectively in order that entities wouldn’t be topic to the identical litigation from the 2 businesses.
“With each agency increasingly eager to file headline-grabbing complaints and report multimillion dollar settlements, their historical coordination and cooperation collapsed,” the submitting states.
Tesla has repeatedly denied wrongdoing in its a number of instances of racial discrimination. In its submitting Monday, it refers back to the allegations as “false” and accuses the EEOC of “hastily wrap[ping] up its sham pre-suit investigation.”
The corporate can be interesting a $3.2 million award granted to a Black former contractor on the Fremont plant in a separate race bias lawsuit.
