Black Tesla Employee, a War Blast Victim, Says White Workers Tormented Him With Rocket Warning Sounds

Another Black worker is suing the tech giant Tesla, claiming white workers tormented him with ringtones set to sound like incoming-rocket warnings, among other race-based abuses.

The Mercury News reported that Marcellous Cage in his lawsuit says he was fired for racist reasons and for reporting life-threatening safety violations.

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

According to the suit, Cage was hired in November 2018 as a project-quality manager working in two Tesla factories. About a month into the position, he noticed a white Tesla contractor he was working with had a ringtone that was similar to the rocket-warning alert Cage experienced while he was working in Afghanistan.

Cage explained to the contractor, in front of several coworkers, why the ringtone bothered him. Caged added that he was twice injured in the country due to explosions.

The contractor refused Cage’s request to change the ringtone and instead kept it to torment Cage. Soon after, a white superintendent and other white workers set their phones to the same tone to harass Cage.

In another factory Cage worked in ,swastikas and the N-word were carved and written in the bathroom walls through Cage’s employment, which Tesla ignored .The suit also states, less than a month after Cage began working at Tesla, a white superintendent accused Cage of stealing stickers from him. Making matters worse, instead of asking Cage about it, several workers broke into Cage’s locked filing cabinet “on a vigilante mission to purportedly look for the missing stickers,” the suit claims. When Cage complained to managers, he was ignored

Cage added when he was working on a project due to regulation issues, a contractor threatened to beat him up. While questioning an expense report, Cage’s supervisor made a racist reference to barbecue.

Tesla has made several large payouts to other former Black employees who sued the tech company claiming many of the same issues as Cage. Last year a federal jury ordered Tesla to pay Owen Diaz $137 million after he sued, claiming other colleagues repeatedly called him racial slurs. Diaz added the Tesla plant was a culture where employees drew swastikas and racist terms in bathroom stalls and left derogatory drawings of Black children around the plant.

The company also paid $1 million to Melvin Berry, who sued Tesla in 2021 because the company failed to stop his supervisors from calling him the N-word.

Racial discrimination lawsuits have become so common at the tech giant, the state of California threatened to sue it earlier this year. In addition, Valarie Capers Workman, one of Tesla’s highest-ranking Black women, left the company earlier this year.