Larry Organ has won two key cases and says he’s not stopping until the company’s policy changes.
Before late 2016, Larry Organ considered electric car maker Tesla Inc. generally to be a force for good.
“At that time, my next door neighbor had a Tesla,” the 60-year-old civil rights attorney said from his office above a pizza parlor just north of San Francisco on a rainy December day. “I thought Tesla was an amazing company — they are trying to change the world and save the planet from global warming.”
Then he got a call from DeWitt Lambert — a call that would launch him on an odyssey on behalf of Black workers against what is now the world’s most valuable automaker.
Lambert, a Black man from Mobile, Alabama, had taken a job at Tesla’s Fremont, California, factory in June 2015. Not long after starting on the production line, supervisors and co-workers used the n-word to harass him with little consequence, he told Organ. Lambert said he was targeted, often by younger colleagues who were not Black. He told Organ that on multiple occasions, a group of harassers flashed gang signs at him; one coworker threatened to cut Lambert up into pieces and send his body parts to his family, he said.
“I had never been called the n-word until I came to California,” Lambert, 49, said in an interview.
Organ filed his first racial discrimination case against Tesla, on behalf of Lambert, in March 2017. Lambert, like the vast majority of direct Tesla employees, had signed a mandatory arbitration...
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