California on Wednesday sued Tesla Inc over allegations of discrimination and harassment of black employees at its San Francisco Bay area factory.
The lawsuit, filed in Alameda County Superior Court, was sparked by hundreds of worker complaints, California Department of Fair Employment and Housing Director Kevin Kish said.
‘RACIALLY SEGREGATED’
The department, which enforces state civil rights laws, “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,” Kish said in a statement reported by the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg.
Details of the lawsuit have yet to be released and Tesla did not immediately issue a response to the lawsuit, which the electric vehicle maker had said was coming several days earlier in an annual filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
However, in a blog post before the filing, Tesla called the suit misguided and said that the state agency had “never once raised any concern” about its workplace practices following a three-year investigation.
The lawsuit appears to focus on accusations by production associates at the factory, who said misconduct took place between 2015 and 2019, the blog post said.
It also said that Tesla would ask the court to “pause the case, and take other steps to ensure that facts and evidence will be heard.”
“Attacking a company like Tesla that has done so much good for California should not be the overriding aim of a state agency with prosecutorial authority,” the blog said.
‘DAILY RACIST EPITHETS’
In October, a San Francisco jury awarded nearly US$137 million to a black contract worker, Owen Diaz, who said that he faced “daily racist epithets,” including the “N-word,” at the plant in 2015 and 2016 before quitting.
Diaz said that employees drew swastikas, workers left racist graffiti and drawings around the plant, and supervisors failed to stop the abuse.
Tesla is appealing that verdict and has denied any knowledge of the racist conduct that Diaz said took place at the plant, which has about 10,000 workers.
Tesla’s blog post said that it “has always disciplined and terminated employees who engage in misconduct, including those who use racial slurs or harass others.”
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
Demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips should spur growth for the semiconductor industry over the next few years, the CEO of a major supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said, dismissing concerns that investors had misjudged the pace and extent of spending on AI. While the global chip market has grown about 8 percent annually over the past 20 years, AI semiconductors should grow at a much higher rate going forward, Scientech Corp (辛耘) chief executive officer Hsu Ming-chi (許明琪) told Bloomberg Television. “This booming of the AI industry has just begun,” Hsu said. “For the most prominent
Former Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) yesterday warned against the tendency to label stakeholders as either “pro-China” or “pro-US,” calling such rigid thinking a “trap” that could impede policy discussions. Liu, an adviser to the Cabinet’s Economic Development Committee, made the comments in his keynote speech at the committee’s first advisers’ meeting. Speaking in front of Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰), National Development Council (NDC) Minister Paul Liu (劉鏡清) and other officials, Liu urged the public to be wary of falling into the “trap” of categorizing people involved in discussions into either the “pro-China” or “pro-US” camp. Liu,
PARTNERSHIPS: TSMC said it has been working with multiple memorychip makers for more than two years to provide a full spectrum of solutions to address AI demand Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it has been collaborating with multiple memorychip makers in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in artificial intelligence (AI) applications for more than two years, refuting South Korean media report's about an unprecedented partnership with Samsung Electronics Co. As Samsung is competing with TSMC for a bigger foundry business, any cooperation between the two technology heavyweights would catch the eyes of investors and experts in the semiconductor industry. “We have been working with memory partners, including Micron, Samsung Memory and SK Hynix, on HBM solutions for more than two years, aiming to advance 3D integrated circuit
RSS