Tesla owners, how do you feel when you read this? “I was on the line making the Model 3 being harassed and fearing for my safety nearly every day. No one should feel this way when they come to work.”
That’s a statement from Jessica Barraza, a production associate at Tesla’s Fremont plant, who alleges in a new lawsuit filed Thursday that she and others encountered “a daily barrage of sexist language and behavior, including frequent groping on the factory floor,” which she said was “known to supervisors and managers and often perpetrated by them.” Barraza’s lawsuit says she “complained repeatedly to managers and to HR, who failed to protect her.”
SF attorney David Lowe, who helped Pinterest’s Chief Operating Officer Francoise Brougher win $22.5 million last year in a gender-discrimination lawsuit, filed the bombshell harassment suit against Tesla on Thursday at Alameda County’s Superior Court.
Tesla, which fired its PR team last year, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. CEO Elon Musk stands by the decision to let go the comms team, and has recently handled his own communications on related matters with mixed results. Musk tweeted a sexist joke in April, and Lowe and Barraza say that attitude from the top has contributed to the culture of harassment.
“Tesla is responsible for the systemic sexual harassment occurring in its factory,” Lowe said in a statement sent to The Examiner. Lowe, of Rudy, Exelrod, Zieff & Lowe in the Financial District, and the Jhaveri-Weeks Firm, also in San Francisco, are seeking compensatory damages for lost earnings, emotional distress and other alleged harm on behalf of Barraza…
If you want to understand what’s going on with Millennium Tower, watch the excellent video from Practical Engineering (online at practical.engineering), hyped on Nick Bastone’s blog, The SF Minute. In a nutshell, the 58-story SOMA building is sinking and leaning because columns supporting the foundation were drilled into a soil layer known as “The old bay clay.” (Admit it, you didn’t think you’d learn a rockin’ geology nickname in this column, did you? That’s on the house.)
As water was pumped out of the old bay clay under many SOMA construction sites, the soil compressed, especially on one side of the tower. Thus, the leaning. A fix was found – sinking more underground columns outside the building to shoulder some of the load, thus evening things out. But the drilling for the fix exacerbated the leaning. Work was halted in August as architects and geologists figure out how to proceed more gently. That’s where things stand, or lean…
