Tesla’s factories and other facilities have been dealing with nasty issues – whether it’s sexual harassment, racism or unsafe conditions – for a really long time, and it seems that poisonous work environment has reached its Gigafactory in Autin, Texas. A number of employees at the plant – which began operations back in 2021 – spoke with The Nation about the things they’ve gone through at Elon Musk’s flagship Tesla factory.
One of the major issues female workers at the plane face is sexual harassment from male superiors, something that isn’t very uncommon at Tesla plants. Joan Rodgers started working at the plant two years ago, and she detailed some of the disgusting behavior she witnessed at the Gigafactory and how the people in charge did nothing to fix the situation in The Nation:
At first, she liked the job. But this past March, her area in a part of the plant called the general store, where workers received package deliveries, got a new, male supervisor. Soon Rogers noticed that any time he was near her—whether walking toward her or standing next to her—he touched and adjusted his penis in her sightline. It happened daily.
Rogers had never experienced sexual harassment from a coworker or supervisor, not even when she worked in a prison. So she asked her lead—a staff member who oversaw her team—to say something so that the supervisor would stop. As far as she could tell, the lead didn’t address the issue with the supervisor. Instead, she started getting threatened with write-ups for things that weren’t her fault. So she escalated the situation, first up the chain of command and then to human resources. But human resources “sent me right back around to the same people giving me problems,” she said. “They direct you to go back to your abuser. They won’t fix anything.” People in charge of her team took her aside to tell her that it was only going to hurt her if she talked to anyone other than them about what was happening.
Two other women complained about the same behavior, and still, nothing was done, she said. Then the man sexually harassing her started to write her up for “everything that I did,” she said. “He just made life miserable.” Tesla policy, she and other workers have told The Nation, is that someone with a write-up on their file can’t be promoted or receive a raise or bonus, which prevented her from moving somewhere else in the plant. “He wrote me up so I could not leave the department,” she said. “It was a nightmare.”
This sort of behavior isn’t exactly surprising. It sure seems like a lot of folks who work at Tesla take behavioral inspiration from its CEO, Elon Musk – a man who has a long history of being weird and creepy to women. Hell, last week he made a “joke” about getting Taylor Swift pregnant.
That attitude toward disobeying laws and allegedly engaging in harassment seems to have seeped onto his factory floors. The Nation reported in April that, according to a review of more than 50 legal documents, government records at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and interviews with workers and their lawyers, Tesla plants in Fremont, California, and Sparks, Nevada, are hotbeds of sexual harassment, racial discrimination, and unsafe working conditions.
Another Tesla employee, Brian Simpson, talked to The Nation about the harassment and discrimination he has seen at the Austin Gigafactory since joining in October of 2023. He also also worked at Chrysler and Toyota – never facing these sorts of issues.
But soon he was hearing about horrific sexual harassment. A woman who was just hired asked a male coworker where the restroom was and after he showed it to her, he told her, “I’m going to rape you now.” She screamed and ran away. She complained to human resources, but Simpson said the woman, who became a friend of his, was told to keep working with the man who had threatened her. Simpson, who said he knows “what’s right and what’s wrong,” felt compelled to complain himself, even if it meant risking his job. But nothing happened.
Then he witnessed harassment firsthand: A manager started talking about his genitals with a female coworker. So he and the coworker went together to complain to human resources. Two days later, Simpson said, she was fired. For his part, he received a write-up for having “an inappropriate conversation,” according to a copy shared with The Nation. “That’s retaliation,” he said. He has since filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which he also shared with The Nation.
[…]
Simpson was so disturbed by having his complaints rebuffed that he struggled to sleep. No longer able to stand the environment, Simpson told the company he was going on leave for 30 days starting in mid-August. In September, he extended his leave by another month. “It’s a circus up there,” he said.
It’s not just sexual harassment either. Tesla employees all over the country have complained about racial discrimination at the company’s facilities. That’s stuff we’ve covered in the past, but now we’re getting a closer look at just what’s happened in Austin.
Rogers and Simpson both described also witnessing discrimination against Black workers in the Austin plant. Simpson heard White and Hispanic coworkers frequently using the N-word around the factory. He worked in quality control, checking production associates’ work after they installed pieces on the cars. But one of those production associates would “bully” the Black workers, he said, by trying to intimidate them into not writing up any errors they caught on his work. He didn’t do it to any of the white or Hispanic ones. When he complained, he said, his supervisor didn’t do anything, and no one ever investigated.
“You don’t see many Blacks that are supervisors, leads, area managers,” Rogers said, herself a Black woman.
Adding to the shit show is the fact that working at the Austin Gigafactory isn’t physically safe for workers. What a disaster.
Just after Rogers started working at Tesla in 2022, she said, she had to go to a part of the factory that was still being built to get a part. When she went to grab the box with the part in it, something else fell on it, and as it fell it yanked her arm with it, tearing her rotator cuff. “I have been working with this shoulder like this ever since,” she said. But the company is fighting against covering the cost of fixing it, she said, only wanting to cover part of the surgery she needs to fully regain use of it.
“A lot of people have gotten hurt in that plant,” Rogers said; she knows others who have gotten hit by forklifts. It’s “very dangerous.” OSHA has inspected the plant four times since it officially opened in 2022, although none of the inspections include details about the complaints or what the agency found; two inspections are open, while two have been closed with seemingly no fines. Victor Gomez was working as an electrician at the plant in August when he was fatally electrocuted by an electrified panel. His family, including his widow and three children, have brought a lawsuit against the company and the contractors he had been hired by, accusing them of gross negligence and seeking $1 million in damages.
“It’s not a safe environment,” Simpson said. “You really have to watch out.”
This place truly sounds like a nightmare – even by Tesla’s standards, and that’s really saying something considering how horrendous Tesla facilities are.
