Go read former Tesla employees’ experiences with racism in their own words

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The Los Angeles Times has a great piece that interviews three former employees of the company about their experiences with racism, discrimination, and retaliation. The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing alleges that the company has a racially segregating workplace.

While the experiences described in the lawsuit and in the Times story are similar, being able to read actual interviews helps connect names, faces, and individual experiences to the situation at the facility in California.

The workers share disturbingly similar stories. Two employees say they were blackballed after reporting racist behavior. One of them recalls asking a supervisor if he should do a four-man job himself. They all report being called the n-word by managers and often with the word attached.

One of the employees says that she wasn't given a performance review, raise, or promotion after she went to HR to stop the harassment from her coworkers. She was fired after hitting a sprinkler with a forklift. She said that another worker hit five sprinklers to keep his job.

The other workers had the same sentiment. After he reported his racist treatment to HR, one person said thatTesla was looking for a reason to fire him. She said she felt like she was forced out of the company because she wasbadgered by her supervisors.

HR emailed her that she was “under investigation for supposedly threatening someone,” she said. Baffled, she asked whom she had threatened, and was told it was someone on the day shift.

But she had worked the night shift.

“People on the day shift told them, ‘We don’t know her,’” Romby said. “It was just a bunch of B.S.”

The company's lawyers mostly denied the allegations to the Times, and listed off reasons why it treated employees the way it did. This isn't the first time thatTesla has faced scrutiny for being hostile. A jury in California ordered the company to pay $137 million in damages after they found that supervisors failed to do anything to stop a former worker from being harassed with racist graffiti and racial slurs.

The company had to pay $1 million to another former employee after he won an arbitration suit, and he reported that his supervisor called him the n-word and retaliated after he confronted him for using the slur. The company has been accused of having a racist culture. Many of the allegations from these cases were denied byTesla.

It's important to see what employees have to say about the situations they were in for themselves, even if reading about court cases can be enlightening. It gives us a better idea of how discrimination can affect people, and their lives going forward. The Los Angeles Times piece is important because of that.