Tesla Dodges Class Action Case, Now Faces Hundreds of Individual Race-Harassment Claims

A California state judge has ruled that more than 14,000 Black workers who alleged racial harassment at Tesla’s flagship assembly plant in Fremont cannot sue as a class, meaning the company is likely to face a flood of individual lawsuits.

According to Superior Court Judge Peter Borkon’s Friday ruling, the 2017 lawsuit cannot move forward as a class action because lawyers for the plaintiffs were unable to find 200 randomly sampled class members willing to forgo a few days of wages to testify ahead of a trial scheduled for 2026.

Borkon said he did not trust that the jury would be able to “reliably extrapolate from the experiences of the trial witnesses to the 14,000 members of the class as a whole.”

“An infinitesimal number of the workers have testified,” Stanford Law School professor emeritus William Gould IV, a former National Labor Relations Board chairman, told KQED. Tesla “has superior resources, and plaintiffs need the class action to really get the defendant’s attention.”

The named plaintiff, former assembly line worker Marcus Vaughn, alleged that Black workers at the Fremont facility were subjected to a range of racist conduct, including slurs, graffiti and nooses hung at their workstations. Vaughn said that line workers and supervisors alike referred to him using a slur on a regular basis and that Tesla did not investigate after he complained in writing to the human resources department.

Instead, Vaughn said, Tesla fired him for “not having a positive attitude” six months after he started the job.

The ruling is a meaningful legal victory for Tesla, but the company still faces multiple lawsuits alleging pervasive race discrimination and other forms of worker mistreatment at its Fremont factory.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces federal anti-discrimination laws, has also brought race discrimination claims against Tesla in federal court in California, and state regulators at the California Department of Fair Employment & Housing are suing in Alameda County Superior Court. The company has settled other race discrimination lawsuits involving individual plaintiffs.

In the wake of the class-action denial, plaintiffs’ lawyers said they intend to press on with a host of individual lawsuits. They’ve already filed more than 500 and plan to eventually file more than 900.

“Tesla has jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire with this decertification, because they are now facing hundreds of victims of race harassment seeking damages in their own suits,” wrote the plaintiffs’ co-lead counsel Bryan J. Schwartz.

Tesla and its attorneys did not respond to requests for comment on Monday, but the board has stated to investors that the company remains “committed to creating and maintaining a respectful and inclusive workplace, and the steps we have taken to prevent and address harassment and discrimination throughout our workforce, and will continue to challenge and defend ourselves against any allegations to the contrary.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s performance at the electric vehicle maker has been both celebrated and dogged by persistent reports of erratic behavior. But at least as regards labor law, his largely successful pushback against the National Labor Relations Board’s attempts to rein in labor practices at his various companies is widely seen as indicating a troubled future for the NLRB.

“We have prominent people that are close to the White House saying that, really, employment discrimination laws should not have existed in the first place,” said Gould, the Stanford law professor emeritus.

Gould said many employees following news headlines may steer clear of lawsuits like Vaughn et al v. Tesla for fear of failure and retaliation from employers.

“Under these circumstances, the fact that workers will not come forward and testify does not necessarily mean that the plaintiffs’ case is weak. It may mean that people are more discouraged and less likely to stick their head up, in the fear that it will get chopped off,” he said.