THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Tesla sued by California civil-rights agency for alleged racial discrimination, harassment

Tesla sued by California civil-rights agency for alleged racial discrimination, harassment

If this prosecution goes ahead, Musk could well move his car factory to a more friendly State. He is already half-way down that path. He also has a factory in China that could be expanded. And that would largely complete the de-industrialization of California, with the resultant loss of working-class jobs and an expanded welfare bill

A California regulatory agency has sued Tesla for alleged racial discrimination and harassment, saying the electric-vehicle maker turned a blind eye to years of complaints from Black factory workers.

The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing’s complaint filed Wednesday targets alleged workplace issues at Tesla’s principal US car plant, located in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“After receiving hundreds of complaints from workers, DFEH found evidence that Tesla’s Fremont factory is a racially segregated workplace where Black workers are subjected to racial slurs and discriminated against in job assignments, discipline, pay, and promotion creating a hostile work environment,” Kevin Kish, the agency’s director, said in a statement.

Tesla didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The company criticised the civil-rights agency’s investigation in a blog post that pre-empted the lawsuit. “Tesla strongly opposes all forms of discrimination and harassment and has a dedicated Employee Relations team that responds to and investigates all complaints,” the company said Wednesday.

Tesla, in the blog post, also cited its status as a manufacturing employer in the state. “Tesla is also the last remaining automobile manufacturer in California. The Fremont factory has a majority-minority workforce and provides the best paying jobs in the automotive industry to over 30,000 Californians,” the company said, adding that legal action was “unfair and counter-productive.” Tesla moved its headquarters to Texas from California last year, though it still makes a large portion of its cars in California.

The auto industry has long faced issues of discrimination on the factory floor. For instance, in 2017, Ford agreed to pay as much as roughly $US10m to settle sexual- and racial-harassment claims brought by individuals at two Chicago-area plants. The settlement followed an investigation by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which said it found female and African-American employees had been subject to harassment. Unlike at Tesla, factory workers at other US automakers are organised by the United Auto Workers union, which represents them in their dealings with the companies, including on workplace issues.

The Department of Fair Employment and Housing, in its lawsuit against Tesla, is seeking unspecified monetary damages, as well as relief including job reinstatement and payment of lost wages and benefits.

The agency said in its lawsuit that Black workers routinely heard Tesla supervisors and managers using racial slurs and were confronted with racist graffiti in the factory. One Black worker heard racial slurs as often as 50 to 100 times a day, the agency said.

Black workers also reported being assigned to more physically demanding roles, experiencing more severe discipline and being passed over for professional opportunities, the agency said. Black workers were severely under-represented in managerial and other professional roles, the agency said.

Tesla said in a 2020 diversity report that Black employees made up 10 per cent of its US workforce and 4 per cent of people in leadership roles. The Department of Fair Employment and Housing said in the lawsuit that Black workers make up roughly 3 per cent of professionals at the Fremont, California plant and about 20 per cent of factory operatives.

“Tesla’s brand, purportedly highlighting a socially conscious future, masks the reality of a company that profits from an army of production workers, many of whom are people of colour, working under egregious conditions,” the agency said in its lawsuit, adding that Tesla’s investigations of complaints aren’t compliant with the law.

Shares in Tesla fell 3 per cent to close at $US904.55 on Thursday.

A federal jury in San Francisco last year found that Tesla had subjected a Black former contract worker to a racially hostile work environment, awarding him roughly $US137m in damages. Tesla has said it doesn’t believe the verdict is justified and has asked for a new trial or for the damages to be reduced.

Another Black former Tesla worker, Melvin Berry, won a $US1m judgment last year after an arbitrator found that his supervisors at the Fremont factory called him a racial slur. Tesla was obligated to investigate and stop the racial discrimination and failed to do so, the arbitrator said in her order. Tesla said that any actions the company took weren’t racially based, according to the order.

Tesla has also faced allegations of sexual harassment in California. More than half a dozen current and former Tesla workers sued the company late last year alleging that Tesla failed to prevent sexual harassment at its facilities, among other claims. Tesla has said it intends to try to move those cases into private arbitration, court records show.

The Department of Fair Employment and Housing has brought other high-profile cases. The California regulator last year sued Activision Blizzard, accusing the video game company of paying female employees less than their male counterparts, among other claims. The company pushed back against the allegations. Microsoft in January agreed to buy Activision.

This isn’t the first time Tesla has clashed with California officials. Nearly two years ago, early in the coronavirus pandemic, Chief Executive Elon Musk took aim at a high-ranking county health official in California over government orders that the company’s Fremont vehicle-assembly plant remain temporarily closed to slow the spread of Covid-19.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/the-wall-street-journal/tesla-sued-by-california-civilrights-agency-for-alleged-racial-discrimination-harassment/news-story/b72e2bc3a37cbc420bcd47ff27037b61

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Tesla sued by California civil-rights agency for alleged racial discrimination, harassment

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