Waymo robot-car trainer claims boss called her ‘fat elephant’ and threw peanuts, phone-snooped on bathroom break

A former trainer for Google-linked Waymo autonomous cars claims in a new lawsuit that a boss and co-worker called her a “fat elephant” and threw peanuts at her, and listened in on her cell phone while she was in the bathroom.

Amanda Watson also alleges in her lawsuit against Waymo contractor Transdev Alternative Services that Transdev disclosed her confidential medical information related to a violent kidnapping. Waymo is a subsidiary of Google’s parent firm Alphabet.

Watson’s lawsuit filed Tuesday claims she suffered “cruel and appalling treatment” working for Waymo via Transdev in San Francisco, where Waymo offers limited robot-car rides. Watson worked on board the company’s autonomous cars as Waymo tested and refined their software on city roads, according to the lawsuit.

Alphabet and Mountain View-headquartered Waymo are not named as defendants in the lawsuit. Neither company responded to questions about the lawsuit, nor did Transdev.

According to the lawsuit in San Francisco County Superior Court, Watson, of San Francisco, returned to the Waymo job in April 2022 after a year of medical leave connected to a three-day kidnapping ordeal. She soon learned that Transdev had told her colleagues about that experience. A female co-worker told her that she, too, had been held hostage, the lawsuit alleges. Watson “found this alarming” because she expected Transdev “to keep her traumatic medical information private,” the lawsuit claims.

That co-worker, who is not named as a defendant in the lawsuit, became her instructor for the remedial training Watson needed to get back up to speed after her leave, the lawsuit said. The co-worker’s mocking of cancer patients — even after Watson told her she had several relatives die from it — her unprofessionalism and aggressive responses to Watson’s questions led Watson to make a formal complaint to her supervisors about her “awful training experience,” the lawsuit alleges.

However, the supervisor who handled the complaint was “close personal friends” with the co-worker, and the two women “began brutally bullying, harassing, and retaliating against” Watson, the lawsuit claims. The purported retaliation by the supervisor — who according to the lawsuit had a Waymo email address for her work at Transdev — included demoting Watson to a low-rung role manually driving the autonomous cars, damaging Watson’s chances for promotion, the lawsuit alleges.

Demotion was “only the beginning,” the lawsuit claims. In car-training exercises, the supervisor can use software to create phantom obstacles such as trees, dogs or people around a vehicle to test a car’s responses, according to the lawsuit. Several times a day, the supervisor would “place multiple children around (Watson’s) car, which would cause the car to short-circuit and place (Watson) in danger,” the lawsuit alleges. “On several occasions, the vehicle (Watson) was operating would swerve and almost hit another car because it thought there were children around the car,” the lawsuit claims. The supervisor was “trying to possibly injure” Watson and make her look bad to Transdev, because the company “could monitor the driver’s actions with audio and video through the employee’s work phone,” the lawsuit alleges.

That monitoring capability also allowed the supervisor to snoop on Watson when Watson was in the bathroom, the lawsuit claims. When employees using the technology take breaks, they notify their supervisor so they “stop listening and recording the employee through their work phone,” according to the lawsuit. An employee can see when a supervisor is actively listening-in on their phone, the lawsuit alleges. Watson, in the bathroom, noticed the supervisor was “still listening through her work phone,” and Watson asked her to stop but she didn’t, the lawsuit claims. Watson was “shocked and humiliated that anyone would so egregiously invade her privacy like that,” the lawsuit alleges.

The supervisor, “for no other reason than her hatred” for Watson, altered Watson’s employment record to strip her of credentials she had “worked tirelessly” to obtain, the lawsuit claims. Right after that purported incident, as the supervisor and Watson walked to an elevator, the supervisor said, “Don’t worry, we will take the elevator, I’m fat, too,” before looking Watson up and down “with disgust” and saying, “on the inside,” the lawsuit alleges.

Regularly, the supervisor and the co-worker would throw peanuts at Watson while she was working, and call her a “fat elephant,” the lawsuit claims.