According to a recent filing from Tesla, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) issued a reasonable cause determination in response to allegations of systemic racism.
In February, the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) revealed that it had received hundreds of complaints from African-American employees who said they had been “divided to the bottom levels of the workforce” and were lacking “leadership representation in executive, senior official, and managerial ranks.” Tesla’s most recent SEC filing revealed that the EEOC had issued a conclusion that “closely parallels” allegations made by California.
According to the document, Tesla will start the “mandatory pre-filing conciliation process” with the EEOC by which it will potentially engage in a mutual settlement with the claimed victims of discrimination.
Tesla had previously characterized the DFEH inquiry as “misguided” and an attempt to “succeed in generating publicity,” with Tesla noting that every one of the more than 50 race-based discrimination claims against them over the previous five years had been rejected by the DFEH.
The company continued, “It strains credibility for the agency to now claim, after a three-year investigation, that widespread racial discrimination and harassment did, in fact, exist at Tesla. A tale concocted by the DFEH and a few plaintiff firms for self-promotion is not valid evidence… Attacking a corporation such as Tesla that has done so much good for California should not be the purpose of a state agency with prosecutorial power.”
The revelation of a federal inquiry comes after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced in May that it would examine Musk’s statement that he had not disclosed his holdings on Twitter on time. Since then, Musk has contested the accuracy of Twitter’s revealed number of phony or spam accounts, as well as the company’s failure to give him adequate data about its user base.
According to a news report from Reuters, the Biden administration’s Department of Energy said on Monday it would offer General Motors (GM) a $2.5 billion loan to finance building new electric battery facilities in Ohio, Tennessee, and Michigan. President Joe Biden has repeatedly praised GM and Ford for their efforts to increase electric vehicle availability, but he has consistently chosen not to watch over Tesla, the world’s largest electric vehicle maker.