State agency asks court to order Tesla to cooperate in discrimination investigation

California officials took action against Tesla in court on Thursday in an attempt to force the company to comply with a state investigation into the alleged illegal harassment of and discrimination against a group of manufacturing employees.

“Tesla’s failure to comply with my office’s obligation to investigate allegations of workplace misconduct shows a lack of respect for the rights and well-being of their workers,” Kevin Kish, the director of the California Civil Rights Department, said in a news release Thursday.

The state’s legal filing asks the court to force Tesla to comply with a confidential subpoena issued by the department on March 3. The state said the subpoena was part of its investigation of a complaint filed in 2021 that alleged discrimination based on sex, race and disability against a group of production and manufacturing workers in California.

That 2021 complaint is separate from an ongoing lawsuit the state filed against the electric-car maker in February 2022, alleging the company discriminated against more than 4,000 current and former Black workers. That lawsuit was the largest racial discrimination suit ever brought by the state in terms of the number of workers affected.

Civil rights officials said in the new court filing that at recent meetings Tesla had argued the state didn’t have the authority for the subpoena that asked for a deposition of a witness who had knowledge of the company’s policies on reporting, handling and investigating complaints of discrimination by employees.

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“Under California law, it is our responsibility to take each and every complaint of civil rights violations seriously — and to follow the facts wherever they lead,” Kish said in the release. “My office is simply seeking to fulfill its statutory duty to investigate allegations of discrimination. Tesla is not above the law.”

Earlier this month, a jury said Tesla owes $3.2 million to Owen Diaz, a Black former contract worker, for failing to protect him from racial abuse. The decision sharply cut the $137-million award Diaz had won two years ago in his civil lawsuit.

In court filings, Tesla denied any knowledge of racist acts against Diaz. The company also denied failing to protect Black employees from discrimination.

This week, the state Supreme Court decided against hearing Tesla’s appeal of a lower court ruling on yet another civil lawsuit by Black workers at the company’s assembly plant in Fremont, Calif.

The lower court had ruled against Tesla’s argument that the employees must first try to settle their complaints through arbitration, a private process that has been shown in studies to favor the interests of companies.

By denying to hear Tesla’s appeal, the state Supreme Court allowed that lawsuit to proceed.

The lower court also ruled that minority workers in the Fremont plant could seek a court order requiring Tesla to acknowledge a climate of racial discrimination at the factory and take steps to stop it.