Pervasive racism at Tesla

November 30, 2018 10:56 AM

Menial Tasks, Slurs and Swastikas: Many Black Workers at Tesla Say They Faced Racism (slnyt)
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon (7 comments total)

This is my surprised face: 😒. Fuck Elon.

*sighs*
posted by Fizz at 11:17 AM on November 30, 2018 [15 favorites]

I mean, on the one hand it's Elon Musk, who is trash, and there's been chatter about the racism at Tesla for at least a year or so. On the other, someone in my union was talking about how they'd taken a very substantial pay cut from what had obviously been a couple of pretty prestigious administrative positions at Big Name Minnesotan Companies (they did not specify, but I could make some guesses) because they got so sick of the racism.

I think this is basically like #MeToo, and what's really going on is that this very explicitly racist garbage is happening constantly in a substantial number of places but is either invisible to the media/outsiders or kept secret. Normally I don't say "a hashtag is needed", but you feel like some kind of viral thing to pull all this together would show that there's a lot more and a lot worse than is talked about.

I mean, other white people don't say this kind of racist stuff in front of me, so it seems far more shocking than it really is. (I really have heard very little overtly racist stuff in spoken out loud in front of me, and that's not because I live in super non-racist places.) They keep it quiet in front of me not because they're afraid of me but because I "look like a liberal" (someone once told me that I had "liberal" glasses) and they know that if I don't hear it, I am less likely to believe that it's happening, and so less likely to believe the victims.
posted by Frowner at 11:21 AM on November 30, 2018 [28 favorites]

Whenever I hear the words "Elon Musk" the song The Space Program by Tribe Called Quest goes on autoplay in my head.
posted by JamesBay at 12:05 PM on November 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

I have the same “ambiguous” skin tone/shade and facial features as Rita Ora, and the stuff I‘ve heard from white people about black people, mostly, but awful stuff about all sorts of non-white folks (because those white people assumed I was some sort of acceptable “spicy” white like Ms. Ora) is nuts. Nothing of this sort of crap is happening at the current job, thankfully, with either co-workers or clients.

When I let those white people know what I thought of them and their stereotypes I’ve never gotten in trouble from higher-ups, though the perps would be reprimanded. I’m sure they had something to say about me off the clock, but fuck them. Those folks avoided me ever after, and I’m sure in some ways in detriment to my career. Oh, well. And I’d leave it to other white co-workers/HR to tell them of my ethnicities. What I am or what other people think I am shouldn’t stop me from speaking up about their -isms, and it doesn’t make a difference what I am; bullshit is bullshit.

Unfortunately, if people and companies who do these things or allow them to go on aren’t materially HURT for doing this, then it will continue. Suing the fuck out of them is, in my opinion, merely a good start. I want people to feel the way about behaving in a racist/all the -ists way the same as the apoplexy they feel over being called racist. How can that happen?
posted by droplet at 12:31 PM on November 30, 2018 [16 favorites]

Tesla has a problem with racism in its factory—so do many of its rivals (Timothy B. Lee for Ars Technica, Nov. 30, 2018)

"Common sense dictates that in a company the size of a small city, there will at times be claims of bad behavior," Tesla told us.

While Tesla appears to have a problem with workplace harassment, the company is also far from the only one in the auto industry to face these kinds of accusations. Similar reports have surfaced concerning many of Tesla's competitors recently:

• On Thursday, the Detroit Free Press reported on a similar situation at a GM factory in Ohio, where eight black workers are suing GM over racial slurs, racist drawings, and other forms of harassment they endured.
• In June, Fiat Chrysler fired a worker who hung a noose inside a Toledo Jeep plant.
• Last year, Ford agreed to pay $10 million to settle charges of racial harassment at two of its factories.
• Last year, a Portland jury awarded a black man a $750,000 judgment against Daimler for harassment he suffered at a truck manufacturing plant.
• In 2014, a black worker sued Honda over what he described as an atmosphere of pervasive racism at an Indianapolis plant.

For now, Tesla told Ars it has extensive policies in place to deal with workplace racism.

"Each employee at Tesla is required to complete an anti-discrimination and sexual harassment training course within 30 days of being hired," Tesla wrote. "When a complaint is made, Tesla’s Employee Relations team investigates immediately and if warranted, takes disciplinary action."

Not to diminish the experiences and culture at Tesla, but rather to point out there's a lot of work to be done to improve corporate and industry ... eff it, our national culture that allows racism and hatred.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:47 PM on November 30, 2018 [13 favorites]

I went to a selective admissions high school in Chicago that had a mostly white catchment area. I went to all the nerdy competitive activities, and got bused around the city to go fill scantron sheets on saturdays. This included Academic Decathlon, so it meant going to meet our big academic rival's team, the mostly African American selective school, Whitney Young. So for two years, we'd meet on this weekends, fill scantron sheets, and hang out waiting for the scores, comparing notes about our experience in school. Then we'd take all the silvers, watch the WHitney Young team take all the golds, and go home.

So from this I came to note an interesting contrast (no longer true today, but all too relevant for this thread.) My high school had an extensive offering of shop classes. We had machine shops, auto shop, even a foundry. All of us had to learn industrial drafting to graduate. And our teachers promised us that these classes would enable us to always just walk into any factory in the Chicago area and get a job on the spot.

Whitney Young had none of this. The students were advised to get into a good school or else they would be screwed for life. There was no plan B presented before the black kids. Only for us. Well, our teachers were right (at the time. Deindustrialization has transformed Chicago beyond recognition.) And Whitney Young's teachers were right. As I learned quickly enough leaving high school, blue collar workplaces can be deeply hostile towards black people. Just getting in the door is hard enough, let alone propsering in such shop floors.

Which gets me to the point: I believe the plaintiffs. I don't think this means Tesla itself is any more racist than other companies. Establishing a professionally run shop floor free of this kind of shit is an uphill battle, and I'm going to venture a guess that the Silicon Valley zeitgeist means that Tesla's upper management are ill equipped to fight that battle, and not even adequately aware that they need to be fighting that battle. But I do not believe any of them are actually on the wrong side.
posted by ocschwar at 3:10 PM on November 30, 2018 [13 favorites]

I do not know much about the culture of the (original) Teslas and Edisons and their predecessors, or what life was like at NASA in the 1950s, but within my own purview, engineering culture has been a cesspool of racist, sexist, libertarian bro-ness for at least fifty years.

I mean, the pool they are hiring from is not a nice pool.
posted by rokusan at 3:19 PM on December 1, 2018 [2 favorites]