Suit claims Black Tesla employee was harassed with rocket-warning sounds, racist symbols

A Black former quality manager for electric car maker Tesla — who says he previously worked as a military contractor and was traumatized after serious blast injuries in Afghanistan — is claiming in a lawsuit that White co-workers tormented him with ringtones set to sound like incoming-rocket warnings, among other race-based abuses.

Marcellous Cage alleged in his lawsuit against Tesla that the company fired him for racist reasons and because he reported life-threatening safety violations in the plant.

“Mr. Cage was fired for two reasons: his commitment to safety and his race,” the lawsuit filed in Alameda County Superior Court claimed.

The legal action follows a slew of similar race-based lawsuits, including one filed in February by California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing, which claimed Black workers at the company’s Fremont facility were paid less than White workers, denied advancements, and faced daily racist abuse, including a noose drawn in a bathroom next to a reference to lynching and a racial slur. In October, a San Francisco federal court jury awarded a Black former worker almost $137 million after he sued Tesla over experiencing “daily racist epithets” in a workplace where colleagues drew swastikas and left racist graffiti and drawings around the facility.

Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Cage’s lawsuit and other suits claiming Tesla allowed widespread racism in its facilities.

Cage said in his suit, filed last month, that Tesla hired him in November 2018 as a project-quality manager, and charged him with creating and launching quality-control and inspection programs for construction work. He worked at both the Fremont factory and Tesla’s battery plant in Nevada, according to the suit.

About a month after his hiring, at the Nevada facility, Cage noticed that a White Tesla contractor he was working with had a phone ring tone that sounded like the rocket-alert warning Cage had experienced while working in Afghanistan, the suit claimed. “Mr. Cage quietly explained, in the presence of several co-workers, that hearing this particular ringtone was extremely disturbing to him, as he had been severely injured in explosions in Afghanistan two different times,” according to the suit. The man refused Cage’s request to change the tone, “opting instead to maliciously … keep the ringtone for the sole purpose of tormenting Mr. Cage,” the suit claimed. Then a White Tesla superintendent and several other White workers set their phones with the same tone, “purely to harass Mr. Cage,” the suit claimed.

In the Fremont factory, swastikas and the n-word were carved and scrawled in employee bathrooms throughout Cage’s employment, with Tesla taking no action, and similar racist symbols were routinely inscribed in portable toilets at the Nevada plant, the suit claimed.

Cage was subjected to hostile, racist treatment from the start of his work at Tesla, the suit alleged. Within his first two weeks, a White superintendent accused Cage — one of two Black workers on a 30-person team — of stealing stickers from him. Instead of asking about the stickers, the man and several other workers broke into Cage’s locked filing cabinet “on a vigilante mission to purportedly look for the missing stickers,” the suit claimed. Cage complained to higher-ups, who took no action, the suit alleged. When Cage stopped working on a project that was not compliant with regulations, a Tesla contractor threatened to beat him up and called him “boy,” the suit alleged. In another alleged incident, Cage’s manager, questioning his expense report, made a racist reference to barbecue, the suit claimed.

Cage also alleged that Tesla management failed to correct numerous serious safety violations because “Tesla’s commitments to unrealistic production goals and frantic efforts to ramp up its production, often to make good on rash promises, overrode any commitment to employee safety.”

The company, formerly headquartered in Palo Alto until a recent switch to Texas, last year was fined more than $140,000 for 22 worker-safety violations related to accidents and complaints at the Fremont factory, government data show.

Cage alleged in his suit that Tesla did not properly track worker injuries, and when Cage reported the problem to management, the company blamed employees for not reporting their injuries, the suit claimed.

While Cage was working at the Fremont plant, he discovered that unqualified inspectors from a contractor had been inspecting “critical construction elements” for more than two years, putting Tesla out of compliance with state and local codes, the suit alleged. “Tesla ignored the issues Mr. Cage raised, and even engaged the same firm for more inspection work soon thereafter,” the suit claimed.

In early 2020, Cage was reassigned to administrative work in a move by Tesla “intentionally designed to muzzle any future reporting by Mr. Cage,” the suit claimed. “The Director of Construction even expressly told him before the transfer: ‘Do not report any more deficiencies.’”

Later that year Cage was “deeply troubled to learn that several Tesla employees were severely injured as a result of safety code violations,” and he escalated his reporting to senior company leadership, the suit alleged. He was fired three months later, according to the suit.

Cage is seeking unspecified damages.