15 Reasons to Boycott Tesla

Over the past few years, it’s become clear that Elon Musk is harmful and dangerous to individuals and the world as a whole. At the same time, he has become one of the 3 richest people in the world, and also one of the most powerful. That’s a toxic and threatening combination. Given he derives most of his power from owning a large amount of Tesla, the only way to really reduce his power is to boycott Tesla.

This is more important than boycotting Twitter for three reasons: 1) Twitter is only a small portion of his wealth. 2) Musk has already done such great damage to Twitter that it has no chance of making a profit under him, and has already lost most of its monetary value. 3) There are now 30 good electric car alternatives to Tesla, but there’s no good alternative to Twitter for human rights activists, journalists, democracy organizers and others working to improve the world. Thus it’s best to avoid killing it, so it can be sold to a white knight who will reverse the Musk changes.

With that in mind, it might be ideal for people to keep their accounts, but mostly use them for important, world-improving things. The results would be: A) Traffic drops by 40% to 60%, so Musk still loses a ton of money. Keep in mind that most of his losses have already come from advertisers not wanting to be associated with racists, hate-mongers, insurrectionists and other vile people he’s restored. A 40% traffic drop on top of that will cause so much bleeding that Musk will be forced to sell. Even with no traffic drop, he’d eventually be forced to sell due to the exodus of advertisers. B) A lot of the most necessary good uses of Twitter continue. C) Potential white-knight buyers are willing to buy it because there are still a large number of users, who still partially use it. In a nutshell, make it bleed badly, but don’t kill it.

But whatever you decide to do with Twitter, we strongly recommend boycotting Tesla because that is where is power really comes from. And as this list makes clear, Musk’s damage to people is far bigger and wider than wrecking Twitter.

People should also know that boycotting Tesla will actually help the EV marketplace and climate change, and not the other way around. This is because the current, irrational “cult of Tesla” is hurting the market for EVs in multiple ways: A) It has been akin to when things like Beanie Babies, Wii video game consoles, Cabbage Patch kids and other products were fads

Monopoly

Tesla now has 73% of EV sales in North America. When something like that occurs, even despite

Diversification

Competition

Lower price points = less carbon emissions

For a transition to EVs to occur, it’s key that all automakers invest heavily in EVs, including large-scale manufacturing of them. But if they come out with high quality cars, as they have, and not enough people buy them because they “desire” the thing they see as “in,” those car companies will scale back their manufacturing, their creation of new models etc.

Wait times of 6 to 12 months results in more emissions than driving an EV sooner.

ACTION STEPS:

– EMAIL LIST

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So without further ado, here are the many reasons to boycott Tesla and Musk.

This could possibly be called 15 reasons to boycott Elon Musk. But given the fact that he derives most of his power and wealth from owning a large amount of Tesla, the best way to boycott him is to boycoutt Tesla.

He’s gotten rid of 65% of the workforce, the majority of key managers are gone, he’s restored the accounts of lots of dubious people including racists, hate-mongers, insurrectionists, and advertisers don’t want their brands associated with it.

This is more important than boycotting Twitter for three reasons: 1) Twitter is only a small portion of his wealth. 2) Musk has done great damage to Twitter even without a boycott, so it’s already lost most of its monetary value. 3) There are now 30 good electric car alternatives to Tesla, but there’s no good alternative to Twitter for human rights activists, journalists, democracy organizers and others working to improve the world.

It is a very important information exchange.

depending on where Tesla’s stock is trading.

1. Dangerous self-driving experiment

1. Long-term blatant, harmful racism at Tesla

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2. Vehement opposition to billionaires paying higher taxes that would reduce taxes on the middle class and poor

3. Aggressive opposition to public transit

1. Gigantic amounts of lying

1. $70,000 electric vehicles don’t solve climate change

1. Musk wants to replace most human jobs with robots

1. Musk is vicious

1. Musk has treated his wives poorly

1. Musk makes false accusations against innocent people

1. Giving dangerous false hope that living on Mars is an acceptable alternative for humans

1. Heavy-duty demonization of unions

Unions may not be perfect and it could be argued that a portion of them exercise too much power. But they have a role to play in a capitalist economic system in order to protect workers and prevent overly greedy companies from holding all the power and taking advantage of workers.

Warning: This story quotes several racist slurs allegedly directed at Black workers at Tesla’s California plant, according to a lawsuit filed against the company.

The N-word and other racist slurs were hurled daily at Black workers at Tesla’s California plant, delivered not just by fellow employees but also by managers and supervisors.

So says California’s civil rights agency in a lawsuit filed against the electric-vehicle maker in Alameda County Superior Court on Thursday on behalf of thousands of Black workers after a decade of complaints and a 32-month investigation.

Tesla segregated Black workers into separate areas that its employees referred to as “porch monkey stations,” “the dark side,” “the slave ship” and “the plantation,” the lawsuit alleges.

Only Black workers had to scrub floors on their hands and knees, and they were relegated to the Fremont, Calif., factory’s most difficult physical jobs, the suit states.

Graffiti — including “KKK,” “Go back to Africa,” the hangman’s noose, the Confederate Flag and “F– [N-word]” — were carved into restroom walls, workplace benches and lunch tables and were slow to be erased, the lawsuit says. ….

The lawsuit comes in the wake of Tesla’s billionaire chief executive, Elon Musk, moving the company’s headquarters from Palo Alto to Austin, Texas, where he is building a major new assembly plant.

The state’s lawsuit suggests the relocation to a state known for looser enforcement is no coincidence, declaring it to be “another move to avoid accountability.”

California lawsuit against Tesla

Not only were Tesla’s Black workers subjected to “willful, malicious” harassment, but they were also denied promotions and paid less than other workers for the same jobs, the suit asserted. They were disciplined for infractions for which other workers were not penalized.

In an interview, DFEH Director Kevin Kish said the lawsuit is the largest ever brought by the state for racial discrimination in terms of the size of the affected workforce since the agency gained prosecutorial powers in 2013.

Before that, complaints were handled by an agency administrative law judge rather than in court. But as more employers have forced workers to sign arbitration agreements preventing them from taking complaints to court, “government has the only effective enforcement mechanism to remedy broad pervasive violations in a workplace,” he said. ….

“Tesla markets its vehicles to the environmentally- conscious, socially responsible consumer,” the lawsuit states. “Yet [that] masks the reality of a company that profits from an army of production workers, many of whom are people of color, working under egregious conditions.”

…

California’s crackdown on the carmaker, which has 36,200 employees in the state and 80,000 worldwide, has been a long time coming. Black workers’ complaints of racial harassment and discrimination at the Fremont plant, which employs 15,000, date from 2012, the agency said.

Black workers make up 20% of Tesla’s factory assemblers, but there are no Black executives and just 3% of professionals at the Fremont plant are Black, the lawsuit said.

In 2017, the California Civil Rights Law Group, a Bay Area firm, filed a class-action lawsuit against Tesla on behalf of 1,000 Black workers. It has interviewed more than 100 who make claims similar to those in this week’s DFEH lawsuit. But that private lawsuit, still in court, covered only workers employed by staffing agencies that did not make them sign arbitration agreements.

Like many companies now, Tesla requires its directly hired employees to sign arbitration agreements, relegating any complaints to secret proceedings with private judges and without any option to appeal. After the 2017 class-action suit, it also required its staffing agency workers to sign agreements waiving their rights to go to court.

Government agencies are not required to respect arbitration agreements, which opens the way for California’s broader lawsuit.

….

Besides the N-word, harassment at Tesla, according to the DFEH lawsuit, included slurs such as “Monkey toes,” “banana boy,” “hood rats” and “mayate,” a Spanish word for dung beetle.

But the Tesla cases are “very unusual,” Organ said, because “Tesla doesn’t enforce its alleged zero tolerance policy for racist conduct.” He added that he had sued the NUMMI auto plant, which occupied the same factory before Tesla, many times for employment cases “but never for racial harassment.”

At Tesla’s Fremont factory, Black workers’ complaints were “ignored or perfunctorily acknowledged and then dismissed” by management, the lawsuit alleges. Those who complained were subject to “retaliatory harassment, undesirable assignments and/or termination.”

Musk, who grew up in South Africa, responded to the 2017 class-action suit, which called the company “a hotbed of racist behavior,” with an email to employees describing company culture as “hardcore and demanding.” Anyone who makes an ”unintentional slur” should apologize, he wrote, and the recipient should “be thick-skinned and accept the apology.” ….

At least 160 worker lawsuits have been filed against Tesla since 2006, according to Plainsite, a court document transparency organization. The last two years have seen a major uptick in racial and sexual harassment suits against Tesla. At least five have been filed in the last six weeks.

One was lodged by a female Black employee who said her female white boss struck her with a hot grinding tool and called her “stupid” and the N-word and insulted her intelligence. The suit says the supervisor was fired but later rehired.

Another was filed by a man who said he wrote directly to Musk to complain about racial harassment and was then told to report to human resources, where he was fired.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-02-11/la-fi-tesla-race-discrimination-lawsuit