Mother Jones; GDA/AP
After Black workers at a Tesla plant in Fremont, California, came forward with explosive allegations of racism at the company last year, the state Supreme Court on Wednesday issued a major ruling in the case, allowing the workers to seek a public injunction requiring the company to acknowledge and address workplace discrimination. In other words, the electric car manufacturer could be legally required to stop being racist.
This decision is a major blow to Tesla, which has denied fostering a racist working environment. The decision comes one week after the company was ordered to pay more than $3 million to a Black Tesla worker who said that the company failed to prevent racist harassment, including the repeated use of racial slurs, from workers at Tesla’s flagship plant.
Tesla’s recent spate of bad PR isn’t limited to its apparent workplace racism. Last week, Reuters published a bombshell report alleging that Tesla workers obtained and shared intimate footage recorded in drivers’ cars, raising serious concerns about privacy inside these computers on wheels. On top of that, Tesla is under investigation by multiple state and federal agencies over the safety and marketing of Autopilot, its self-driving software. That leaves Tesla founder Elon Musk with a lot of messes to clean up—and that’s not even counting the fiasco over at Twitter.
