A worker at Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California, has sued the company over what he claims are months of racial, sexual, and physical harassment by his co-workers. Tesla did little to stop it, the suit alleges.
The lawsuit was filed Monday in Alameda County Superior Court on behalf of Dewitt Lambert, an African-American man who moved from Alabama to California in 2012 specifically to seek work at Tesla. In it, Lambert alleges that shortly after his job began in 2015 on the assembly line, he faced consistent harassment by his younger colleagues.
Specifically, Lambert claims that the named co-workers made remarks like “Don’t this n****r look just like Samuel Jackson?” and “I bet you my dick is bigger than yours,” along with other similar disparaging comments.
The automaker, which did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment, provided a statement to TechCrunch and other media outlets in which it characterized Lambert’s lawsuit as a “disingenuous narrative that is at odds with the facts.”
This suit marks one in a string of recent similar lawsuits that have hit the tech sector, alleging similar harassment and claimed racial discrimination.
Rotation, rotation
By late 2015, Lambert says that he complained to his supervisor and to the company’s human resources department.
“However, the hostile work environment continued and there was no evidence human resources conducted any investigations into Mr. Lambert’s complaints or took action to stop the harassment which continued,” the civil complaint alleges.
To add insult to injury, Lambert also claims that his harassing co-workers were promoted, while he was not. The following year, when he got a new supervisor, he says that he was reprimanded for eating a “snack bar” on the assembly line, despite the fact that his immediate coworkers shared donuts just days earlier with no similar comments from the supervisor.
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