Former Tesla HR execs Linda Peloquin, Adam Chow, Tiara Paulino, Sharnique Martin, Gregory Vass and Ozell Murray just filed a lawsuit against Tesla Inc., in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California Case 3:25-cv-06690-AMO. The lawsuit concerns the automaker’s Fremont, California, facility that has been at the center of several previous discrimination lawsuits.
These former Tesla HR professionals alleged that they were either fired or effectively forced to resign after attempting to surface other employees’ race discrimination and retaliation complaints at the company’s Fremont, California, plant.
According to the Peloquin complaint, one of Tesla’s HR managers, Nicole Burgers, was a “common denominator” in the various claims made by the plaintiffs. They alleged that the manager, the overall HR manager for the entire Fremont facility, “had an irrational fixation on fostering the delusion that the environment and culture at Tesla is one of tolerance and innovation, rather than racism and retaliation.”
Allegations continue to say that “Much of Tesla’s workplace toxicity stems from its rapid sales growth and manufacturing demand, and the breakneck pace at which it hired employees to work in its plants and overall operation. Since its introduction in 2020, Tesla’s “Model Y,” for instance, has become the Company’s top-selling vehicle line – and, by most estimates, one of the top-selling electric vehicles in the world. Thus, there was, and remains, constant pressure to keep the Model Y’s sales trajectory high.”
“Yet, as a consequence of this desire to produce vehicles at such a rapid pace, the Company has failed to cultivate a healthy working environment at the Fremont facility, and instead fostered one that is beset with racism, sexism, cronyism, and outright physical violence.”
Plaintiffs claim “even employees that had been terminated for instances of workplace violence were loopholed back in via temp agencies. That meant, then, that oftentimes the employee who had been previously victimized had to actually resume working with their attacker and tormentor.”
“In fact, that Senior Security Manager himself was attacked and suffered a serious injury when he attempted to stop a loopholed employee – one who had been returned to work after being terminated for cause – after that employee came back aboard and attacked another worker.”
At some point plaintiffs allege that Tesla “turned its ire on the HR professionals that had merely investigated and substantiated the bases of the complaints. So, oddly, in most instances it was the HR official that wound up being penalized and pushed out for substantiating the alleged wrongdoing rather than the wrongdoer themselves. Consequently, a dizzying number of HR professionals – the Plaintiffs here: Peloquin, Chow, Paulino, Martin, and Vass, among them – have either been outright fired for substantiating complaints of discrimination and retaliation, or resigned because they saw a termination coming and did not want that type of disciplinary stain on their job history.
Details of the complaint allege “A common denominator in many of these terminations is a HR Manager named Nicole Burgers. By all accounts, Burgers has had an irrational fixation on fostering the delusion that the environment and culture at Tesla is one of tolerance and innovation, rather than racism and retaliation. By all accounts, given that Burgers was the overall HR manager for the entire Fremont facility, she believed that she would be held accountable for further instances of racism and misconduct at the Fremont location – particularly in light of the pending State, Federal, and private litigation against the Company. Thus, rather than undertake to change the culture and environment that fostered those types of instances of racism, Burgers instead undertook to weed out the HR professionals beneath her that merely investigated and substantiated the occurrence of that type of depravity.”
Page 24 of the 159 page complaint continues to provide details by writing “Karen Draper was one of the first dominos to fall in what became a long line of retaliatory terminations by Burgers and her Texas-based counterparts – Allie Arebalo, Bert Somsin, Jenifer Romero, and Leah Allen – or, instances where other HR professionals simply resigned under protest because they knew Burgers had begun to target them.