Women Accuse Tesla of Fostering Environment of ‘Rampant Sexual Harassment’ At Factories: Elon Musk ‘Doesn’t Set a Good Example’
Win McNamee/Getty Images
A female worker at a Tesla factory in Fremont, CA has sued the automaker, alleging “rampant sexual harassment” on a nearly daily basis, and she has pointed a finger at Elon Musk, saying the CEO has fostered this environment with his irreverent tweets and conduct.
Jessica Barraza filed the lawsuit on Thursday. In an interview with the Washington Post, she said she had been targeted by her coworkers with catcalls and what the Post described as “aggressive physical touching” just a few months after her employment began:
Co-workers would describe her as having a “Coke bottle figure,” “onion booty,” “fat a–,” “fat a– t–ies,” Barraza, 38, recalled in an interview with The Post. In the suit, she alleges a male co-worker picked her up by her waist, “pressing against her torso under her breasts” and placed her next to him. In a separate incident, the lawsuit alleges, a male co-worker stuck his leg between her thighs as she was clocking back in from lunch. (Another employee corroborated the incident to The Post.) That was the last straw, she said…
In the suit, filed in California Superior Court in Alameda County, Barraza says she was subject to vulgar comments about her body, was propositioned by a supervisory lead over text message and was frequently touched inappropriately by co-workers, who she alleges brushed up against her backside multiple times a week.
The harassment continued for nearly three years before she filed her suit, said Barazza, calling it dehumanizing. The “nightmarish conditions” of “rampant sexual harassment at Tesla,” the lawsuit alleges, resulted in a factory floor environment that “more resembles a crude, archaic construction site or frat house than a cutting-edge company in the heart of the progressive San Francisco Bay area.”
The Post reviewed multiple complaints that Barraza filed with Tesla HR earlier this year, and also spoke to three other current and former Tesla employees who corroborated her account and made similar allegations against the company, describing Tesla’s culture as “male-driven, retaliatory and unwelcoming to women.”
Barraza accused Musk of fostering this environment, highlighting one of the latest examples of his irreverent public comments and social media posts.
Barraza said this workplace culture is bred at the top of the company, citing a joking tweet by CEO Elon Musk referencing a university he planned to start: Texas Institute of Technology & Science. (He left readers to interpret the acronym: TITS.)
“That doesn’t set a good example for the factory — it almost gives it like an … ‘he’s tweeting about it, it has to be okay,’ ” she said. “It’s not fair to myself, to my family to other women who are working there.”
