Tesla fired ‘angry Black woman’ after ‘maniacal’ White manager sought illegal termination of Latina worker: lawsuit

Tesla has been hit with more claims of racism in its Fremont electric car factory, with a Black former human resources manager alleging in a new lawsuit that she was fired over her refusal to illegally terminate a Latina worker targeted by a White manager.

Karen Draper, 47, of Oakland was hired in February 2022 to manage five HR workers serving staff at the Fremont plant, according to the lawsuit filed Friday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

Draper’s undoing at Tesla started seven months later, when a Latina female production supervisor received approval to go on medical leave and a manager embarked on a “crusade” to get the woman fired while on leave, the lawsuit against Tesla claimed.

The manager, who is not named as a defendant, disliked the supervisor “because of her Latina ethnicity and female gender,” the lawsuit alleged.

Draper’s purported pushback against the attempted termination, along with “race-based animus and bias against Black women” at Tesla, got her fired instead, the lawsuit claimed.

Tesla, which moved its headquarters from Palo Alto to Texas in late 2021, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The legal action comes as the car maker, run by CEO Elon Musk, faces a slew of other lawsuits alleging racism and sexism in its facilities. Early last year, California’s civil rights regulator sued Tesla, alleging Black workers at the company’s Fremont facility were paid less than White workers, denied advancements, and faced daily racist abuse, including a noose drawn in a bathroom next to a reference to lynching and a racial slur. Tesla has called the lawsuit, in Alameda County Superior Court, “misguided” and “unfair.”

Another lawsuit filed last year against Tesla claimed a Fremont factory manager would greet employees with statements including “welcome to the slave house” and that the n-word was scrawled all over inside the plant. A third lawsuit last year by a Black worker at a Tesla parts factory in Lathrop alleged a White co-worker called her the n-word and assaulted her, was fired, then rehired about two weeks later. A fourth lawsuit last year claimed a Black former quality manager’s White colleagues tormented him because of his race and Tesla fired him for racist reasons and because he reported life-threatening safety violations in the plant.

Last month, Tesla was ordered to pay a Black former Tesla worker about $3.2 million, most of it in punitive damages, after a judge in the racism-based case threw out an earlier jury award of $137 million. Owen Diaz had alleged in his 2017 lawsuit against Tesla that as a contracted elevator operator at the firm’s electric car factory in Fremont in 2015 and 2016, he endured “daily racist epithets,” including the n-word, and that colleagues drew swastikas and left racist graffiti and drawings around the plant.

Draper claimed in her lawsuit that her attempts to stop the company from illegally firing the supervisor — who worked on production of Tesla’s best-selling Model Y compact SUV — put her in conflict with the manager pushing for the firing, who was a production manager for the Model Y.

“The Model Y production managers wielded a lot of institutional power within the company and frequently held face-to-face meetings with Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk,” according to the lawsuit. “Musk frequently traveled to Tesla’s Fremont production facility to walk the Model Y manufacturing line and interact directly with production floor employees and production managers. There was, and remains, constant pressure to keep the Model Y’s sales trajectory high.”

That “institutional pressure” meant managers on the Model Y line needed to be kept happy, so Draper’s refusal to go along with the man’s wish to get the supervisor fired led Draper’s superiors to feel “retaliatory animus” toward her, the lawsuit claimed. “They believed that they could be held responsible for not fostering an environment that coddled and appeased Model Y production managers,” the lawsuit alleged.

When HR staff, under Draper’s direction, tried to tell the manager that firing the supervisor without cause while she was on leave would be illegal and expose Tesla to legal action, he became “loud, aggressive, and maniacal,” the lawsuit claimed. When Draper herself met with him, he was “loud, rude, rabid, and intransigent,” the lawsuit alleged.

After Draper brought the issue to her direct manager, Tesla opened an investigation against her for “not capitulating to a production manager’s demands,” the lawsuit claimed. Draper’s managers, in discussions with her over the dispute, used race-based stereotypes including calling her an “angry Black woman,” describing her as “aggressive” and “out of control,” and accusing her of “playing the race card,” the lawsuit claimed.