By Daniel Wiessner
(Reuters) – Tesla Inc has asked a U.S. judge to pause a federal agency’s lawsuit accusing the electric carmaker of severe harassment of Black workers at its California assembly plant, saying two similar cases should play out first.
Tesla, in a filing in San Francisco federal court on Monday, said the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) rushed to file the lawsuit in September as part of a “toxic interagency competition” with a California civil rights agency that made similar claims last year.
The EEOC did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
The EEOC alleges that from 2015 to the present, Black workers at Tesla’s Fremont, California plant have routinely been subjected to racist slurs and graffiti, including swastikas and nooses, and have faced retaliation for complaining.
California’s Civil Rights Department (CRD) in its 2022 lawsuit accused Tesla of tolerating similar conditions and discriminating against Black workers when making decisions about pay, promotions and work assignments. A pending proposed class action filed by Tesla workers in 2017 also alleges racial harassment.
Both of those cases are in state court and allege violations of California anti-discrimination laws. The EEOC lawsuit involves a separate federal law banning workplace race discrimination and harassment.
In Monday’s filing, Tesla said the federal court should decline to wade into a third lawsuit until the existing cases are resolved.
“Simultaneous prosecution of the state court actions and this case will involve substantial duplication of effort, create a significant risk of inconsistent court rulings, and result in an inefficient and wasteful use of judicial resources,” Tesla’s lawyers wrote.
Tesla has denied wrongdoing in the pending cases and repeated those claims in Monday’s filing, calling the allegations “a false narrative that ignores Tesla’s track record of equal employment opportunity.”
The company, meanwhile, is appealing a $3.2 million award granted to a Black former elevator operator at the Fremont plant in a separate race harassment lawsuit.
(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and David Gregorio)
