A California judge has reversed a 2024 ruling that allowed more than 6,000 Black workers at Tesla’s Fremont factory to pursue racial harassment claims as a class action, delivering a significant legal victory to the electric vehicle maker amid mounting workplace discrimination allegations.

California Superior Court Judge Peter Borkon ruled late Friday that the 2017 lawsuit cannot proceed as a class action because plaintiff attorneys were unable to find 200 class members willing to testify ahead of a trial scheduled for 2026. The decision reverses a 2024 certification by Judge Noël Wise, who had concluded that Tesla’s alleged pattern of failing to prevent racial discrimination presented common questions affecting all Black workers at the plant.

Worker Testimony Challenge Dooms Class Action Status

Judge Borkon stated he could not trust that the experiences of a smaller sample of workers could be applied to the entire class of more than 6,000 employees. According to Reuters, Borkon said the 2024 class certification was based on the belief that a trial in the large-scale case would be manageable—an assumption that unraveled when attorneys struggled to secure witness participation.

Lawrence Organ, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, told Reuters that many of the randomly selected workers are “low-income workers who cannot afford to miss work to participate in the case.” This creates a catch-22: the workers most affected by alleged harassment often cannot afford to testify, yet that inability becomes grounds to deny class action status.

The named plaintiff, former assembly-line worker Marcus Vaughn, originally filed the lawsuit in 2017, alleging that Black workers at the Fremont, California factory were subjected to racist conduct including slurs, graffiti and nooses hung at their workstations.

Multiple Discrimination Cases Still Pending

While this ruling eliminates the class action threat, Tesla faces several other race discrimination proceedings. A trial involving the California Civil Rights Department (formerly the Department of Fair Employment and Housing) is scheduled for June 2026, just two months after the now-uncertain April trial date for individual plaintiffs who may choose to proceed.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has also filed federal race discrimination claims against Tesla in California. According to the EEOC’s complaint, Black employees at Tesla’s Fremont facilities have “routinely endured racial abuse, pervasive stereotyping, and hostility” since at least 2015, with slurs used openly in high-traffic areas and racist graffiti appearing on desks, bathroom stalls, elevators, and even on new vehicles rolling off the production line.

Tesla has settled other individual race discrimination lawsuits. The company maintains it does not tolerate workplace harassment and has fired employees engaged in racial misconduct.

Legal Win Amid Broader Workplace Scrutiny

The Fremont factory, which produces the Model 3 and Model Y, has been at the center of multiple workplace allegations over the past several years. In 2024, a Black former elevator operator, Owen Diaz, settled for $3.2 million after initially winning a $137 million jury verdict for racist abuse he experienced at the plant.

Most recently in April 2025, Tesla settled a disturbing lawsuit filed by Raina Pierce, a Black female employee who alleged a manager regularly used phrases like “Welcome to the plantation” et “Welcome to the slave house” on the production line. The settlement terms were kept private.

The decertification means each of the 6,000 potential plaintiffs would need to file individual lawsuits to pursue their claims—a costly and time-consuming process that few low-wage factory workers can afford. This effectively limits Tesla’s legal exposure while leaving unresolved questions about the workplace culture at one of America’s most important EV manufacturing facilities.

Stock Market Reaction

Tesla shares rose approximately 3.8% on Monday following news of the ruling, trading around $419.61 as investors welcomed the reduced legal risk. Stifel separately raised its Tesla price target to $508, citing growing Full Self-Driving adoption and robotaxi potential.

EVXL’s Take

This legal victory for Tesla highlights a troubling pattern we’ve documented repeatedly: the company wins in court while evidence of workplace problems keeps mounting. When we covered the Raina Pierce settlement in April, we noted that Tesla’s Fremont factory had faced “mounting allegations of discrimination” with multiple cases painting “a grim picture of systemic issues at a facility critical to Tesla’s output.”

Now we see the system working exactly as designed—not to resolve whether discrimination occurred, but to make it prohibitively expensive for workers to prove it did. Judge Borkon’s reasoning creates an impossible standard: you need 200 workers willing to testify to prove systematic discrimination, but the workers most affected can’t afford to miss shifts at the factory. It’s the legal equivalent of telling someone their house isn’t really on fire because they can’t gather enough witnesses who are willing to stand in the flames.

Back in February 2022, when California first announced plans to sue Tesla, we noted the company’s insistence that it had “never once” been found guilty of workplace misconduct despite dozens of individual complaints. Three years later, Tesla has settled multiple individual cases, faces ongoing EEOC and state civil rights trials, yet continues to claim vindication with each procedural victory.

Here’s what matters for EV enthusiasts: the cars we love are built by human hands in facilities that should meet basic standards of dignity and respect. Tesla has pioneered electric vehicle technology and made EVs mainstream, but innovation doesn’t excuse tolerating racism on the factory floor. As we said in April, “a car’s value isn’t just in its range or tech—it’s in the hands that build it.”

This ruling doesn’t resolve whether discrimination happened at Fremont. It just makes it harder to prove in court. With multiple other cases still pending—including trials by California and federal EEOC—we’ll be watching closely to see if Tesla finally addresses workplace culture issues, or continues settling and litigating individual cases while denying any systemic problems exist.

What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments below.