Tesla wants to stop a federal agency’s lawsuit against the automaker for racial bias against its black workers at its Fremont assembly plant.
The electric vehicle maker, in a filing in federal court in San Francisco on Monday, accused the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) of rushing to file a lawsuit in September against Tesla as part of a “toxic interagency competition” with a civil rights agency of California. which sued the automaker on similar grounds last year.
The EEOC’s lawsuit alleges that Tesla violated federal law by tolerating widespread and ongoing racial harassment of its black employees and by subjecting some workers to retaliation for speaking out against the harassment. The EEOC filing details black workers enduring the occasional use of slurs and epithets, including variations of the N-word, “monkey,” “boy,” and “black bitch,” as well as racist graffiti calling for violence against blacks. other forms of abuse.
California Department of Civil Rights claims against Tesla include similar examples of harassment by black workers.
Both cases are in state court and allege Tesla violated California’s anti-discrimination laws. The EEOC’s lawsuit includes an allegation that Tesla also violated a federal law that prohibits racial discrimination and harassment in the workplace.
Tesla is also facing a proposed class action alleging racial harassment filed by employees in 2017.
The EEOC did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
Tesla’s filing on Monday said the federal court should decline to open a third lawsuit until the existing cases are resolved. Lawyers for the auto industry argued that prosecuting three cases at the same time would involve “significant duplication of effort,” create a risk of “inconsistent judicial decisions” and waste judicial resources.
Tesla invokes what is referred to here as the Colorado River doctrine of abstention, which is a legal principle that would allow a federal court to refrain from hearing a case if there is a parallel proceeding in state court covering the same issues. The objective behind the doctrine is to avoid duplicate litigation and to promote more efficient justice.
The turf war Tesla refers to in its filing is between the EEOC and the California Civil Rights Division (CRD), formerly the Department of Fair Employment and Housing. The filing claims that, historically, the EEOC and CRD have worked together so that entities are not subject to the same litigation by the two agencies.
“As each agency is increasingly willing to file complaints and report multimillion-dollar settlements, their historic coordination and cooperation has broken down,” the filing says.
Tesla has repeatedly denied wrongdoing in the multiple cases of racial discrimination. In her filing on Monday, she referred to the claims as “false” and accused the EEEE of “hasty folding[ping] until the false preliminary investigation”.
The company is also appealing a $3.2 million award made to a black former contractor at the Fremont plant in a separate race-bias lawsuit.
