That’s according to a lawsuit filed Thursday claiming Apple systematically paid thousands of women less than men. It alleges that on the printer in the Apple office in Sunnyvale where Jong worked was a W-2 tax form belonging to a male colleague who did the same job she did, Jong said.

“He was being paid almost $10,000 more than me,” said Jong, a training instructor in Apple’s marketing department.

Apple, valued at $3.3 trillion in the stock market, did not respond Thursday to requests for comment.

Jong, employed at the company for more than a decade, and another long-time Apple worker, Amina Salgado, an AppleCare manager, filed the lawsuit in San Francisco County Superior Court against the Cupertino iPhone and app store giant. It claims Apple underpaid more than 12,000 women in its engineering, marketing, and “AppleCare” warranty departments.

Jong and Salgado are seeking class-action status and a court order awarding back pay, with 10% interest, to the thousands of current and former female employees allegedly victimized by Apple’s pay practices over the past four years.

“Apple systematically paid women lower compensation than men with similar education and experience,” the lawsuit claimed.

The legal action puts a renewed spotlight on Silicon Valley’s male-dominated technology industry. Google in 2022 agreed to pay $118 million to up to 15,500 women to settle a years-long class-action lawsuit alleging the Mountain View company discriminated against female employees. Four plaintiffs accused Google, whose most-recent diversity report shows about a third of its workforce are women, of slotting female workers into lower salary levels than men, giving women lower-paying jobs, promoting women more slowly and less frequently, and generally paying female employees less than men for similar work. Apple’s most-recent report shows a similar gender breakdown.

This week’s lawsuit against Apple alleged that until late 2017, Apple asked potential hires about their previous pay, leading the company to put women on lower starting salaries than men for the same work. Jong, hired in 2013, was offered “essentially the same base salary that she had received at her prior job,” the lawsuit said. Salgado, brought on in 2012, later complained to Apple several times that she was being paid less because of her gender, and an investigation by a third-party company Apple hired confirmed the underpayment, according to the lawsuit. Apple raised Salgado’s salary, but refused to give her back pay “for the years during which she was paid less than men,” the lawsuit claimed.

After the new law took affect, Apple pivoted to asking applicants about their salary expectations, according to the lawsuit. Research indicates people’s stated salary expectations are typically only slightly higher than their previous pay, so Apple’s use of that information to set salaries “has had the effect of perpetuating past pay disparities and paying women less than men,” the lawsuit alleged.

Because Apple is required by law to keep records of wage rates and job classifications for all its California employees, it knew, or should have known, it was underpaying women, “yet took no action to remedy the inequality,” the lawsuit claimed.

Over time the pay disparity widens for female Apple workers because raises are based on a percentage of base salary, the lawsuit charged.

Apple also pays a premium to workers it deems to have “talent,” and according to the lawsuit, “more men are identified as having talent.”

The lawsuit also seeks an order barring Apple from paying women less than men for the same work.

The “California Forever” project has divided county residents, with some applauding its promise of jobs and housing, and others opposing it over loss of agricultural land and the approach by its proponents, who spent years buying thousands of acres in secrecy then launched a $510 million lawsuit accusing holdout property owners of “endless greed.”

On Tuesday, the Solano County Registrar of Voters announced that California Forever’s proposal to amend the county plan and rezone more than 17,000 acres for development had gathered enough signatures to go before voters in November. Ads pitching the project describe an idyllic community of “walkable, middle class neighborhoods that we can afford.”

Solano County supervisors now have three choices, according to John Gardner, assistant registrar of voters for the county. They could adopt the plan at a June 25 meeting, so it would go ahead without a ballot measure. They could vote to put the initiative on the ballot. Or they could order a report assessing effects of the project.

But then supervisors must still choose between adopting the initiative unchanged or putting it on the ballot, also unaltered, Gardner said.

The project was launched, quietly, in 2017, led by former Wall Street trader Jan Sramek. Its financial backers include billionaire venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Michael Moritz, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and businesswoman Laurene Powell Jobs.

Marketing materials show Mediterranean-style communities California Forever says should provide homes for 50,000 people by late in the 2030s. The company is also promising 15,000 local jobs paying more than $88,000 a year, plus $200 million for revitalizing downtowns in the county, and down-payment assistance for buyers.

A February report by Solano County’s legal department said the full environmental impacts of a new city, and its financial feasibility, could not be known until after it went before voters.

Francisco Bandeira, Jr., a manager in the San Francisco headquarters of Sunrun — a residential-solar firm valued at $3.2 billion in the stock market — “often acted erratically and violently” while impaired by drugs or alcohol, the lawsuit claims.

“Bandeira routinely engaged in heavy substance abuse at work, consuming cocaine, alcohol, and prescription pills in the office, at work conferences, and work events,” the lawsuit filed Friday in San Francisco County Superior Court on behalf of Nick Thierry and Evelyn Barrera said. “Bandeira pressured employees, including … Barrera, to partake in cocaine, alcohol, and crack in the office or at work events.”

Barrera alleged that three months after she started in sales at Sunrun in San Francisco in late 2021, Bandeira slapped her backside as she stood outside a meeting. She told him to never do it again, but Bandeira “repeatedly” touched her inappropriately over the next year, while appearing intoxicated on alcohol or drugs, the lawsuit said.

After Barrera refused Bandeira’s “repeated advances and pressure to take drugs and alcohol,” she found out he was “making degrading comments about her to other employees in the office,” the lawsuit alleged.

Bandeira could not be reached for comment. It was unclear if he currently works at Sunrun. The company did not respond to a request to make him available for an interview. In a statement, the company said, “These allegations are extremely concerning and inconsistent with Sunrun’s culture and values. Workplace safety is of paramount importance, and we do not tolerate any form of harassment, threats of violence, or illegal behavior.”

Thierry started in sales in Sunrun’s headquarters in 2021, and by 2022 led the company in sales, according to the lawsuit.

“Thierry personally reported Mr. Bandeira’s in-office drug use to two of (Sunrun’s) vice presidents, as well as the sales director,” the lawsuit claimed. “Thierry made these reports at least 10 times over the course of 2022.”

Sunrun, the lawsuit alleged, “took no corrective action.”

In the spring of 2022, Bandeira and another employee got into “an out-of-office altercation,” the lawsuit claimed. Bandeira instructed a direct subordinate “to bring a gun into work and shoot said employee if he showed up angry to an upcoming work meeting,” the lawsuit alleged.

Although the purported incident was reported to Sunrun’s human resources department, the company “took no corrective action,” the lawsuit claimed.

Bandeira’s behavior “continued to escalate through 2022 and 2023,” with Sunrun failing to rein him in, the lawsuit alleged.

Near the end of 2023, Thierry and Barrera were allowed to move to Sunrun’s Los Angeles office, but because they still had to work with Bandeira, conditions did not improve, the lawsuit claimed. Sunrun directed Bandeira to deny the two the resources they needed to run the L.A. office by withholding personnel and engaging in “a concerted effort to make the work so difficult” the two would quit, the lawsuit alleged. Barrera, unable to tolerate the situation, resigned in December 2023, the lawsuit claimed.

Early this year, Thierry arrived at work and discovered his office had been cleared out and his belongings “placed in boxes in a janitor’s closet,” the lawsuit alleged. Thierry contacted the personnel department but received no response, the lawsuit claimed. Thierry quit in February, according to the lawsuit.

He and Barrera are seeking unspecified damages.

Holmes, 40, was convicted by a jury in early 2022 on four felony counts of defrauding investors in Theranos, her now-defunct Palo Alto blood-testing startup. On Tuesday, her appeal was heard in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, with one of her lawyers and a prosecutor facing off before a three-judge panel.

Holmes’s lawyer, Amy Saharia, claimed that Judge Edward Davila, who presided over the trial in the U.S. District Court in San Jose, had improperly allowed former Theranos scientist Dr. Kingshuk Das to give expert testimony before the jury. Appellate court Judge Ryan Nelson indicated in comments Tuesday that she may have a point.

“There’s a pretty good story here for Ms. Holmes,” Nelson said. “They do have a pretty good basis for some unfairness here.”

Even so, he noted that her conviction is supported by “pretty overwhelming evidence.”

Much of the 50-minute hearing was consumed by arguments over whether the judge in Holmes’ trial broke court rules by letting Das tell the jury his opinions about how poorly Theranos’ technology performed. Appeals courts can order new trials if they find trial judges made mistakes in applying the law or if proceedings were not fair.

Jurors in Holmes’ four-month trial in San Jose U.S. District Court heard that Das’ examination of Theranos’ processes and technology led him to void all the test results — 50,000 to 60,000 of them — from the company’s problematic ‘Edison’ blood-analyzer devices. Das told the jury that after he informed Holmes that her devices “were apparently malperforming from the very beginning,” she countered with an “alternative explanation” that the problems arose from the company’s quality-assurance processes, not its machines.

But Saharia argued that statements by Das, including “I found these instruments to be unsuitable for clinical use,” broke court rules and should never have been heard. His testimony about whether the technology worked represented opinions based on scientific evidence, and under court rules, such statements in a jury trial can only come from witnesses who go through the court process of being deemed experts, Saharia argued.

Nelson said he had “some problems” with the testimony Davila allowed Das to provide and suggested that prosecutors used Das to “get in some of that testimony” that should have only come from an expert witness.

Federal prosecutor Kelly Volkar told the judges Davila “carefully parsed” Das’ testimony and sustained several objections from Holmes’ lawyers when Das was being questioned on the witness stand.

“This was a case where every issue was often litigated to death,” Volkar said, adding that Davila “took great care in making rulings.”

Judge Jacqueline Nguyen said Davila properly allowed Das to discuss what he told Holmes. But Nguyen appeared to agree that the testimony requiring “highly specialized knowledge” was not appropriate for a witness not court-approved as an expert.

Saharia said Holmes’ legal team does not dispute that Theranos testing was inaccurate.

“The central issue in this case was whether Ms. Holmes knowingly misrepresented the capabilities of Theranos’ technology,” Saharia said. “She in good faith believed in the accuracy of this technology.”

Holmes, a Stanford University dropout, was charged in 2018 in connection with $878 million in losses among Theranos investors. Davila pegged the hit to investors resulting from her criminal conduct at $381 million.

In November 2022, Davila sentenced Holmes, a mother of two young children, to 11 years and three months in prison. Holmes, U.S. Bureau of Prisons inmate No. 24965-111, has slashed about two years off her sentence — likely through good behavior and taking programs at her minimum-security prison — and is scheduled to walk free in August 2032.

Theranos, founded by Holmes in 2003 and once valued at $9 billion, claimed its machines could use just a few drops of blood from a finger-prick to perform more than a thousand tests, for everything from diabetes and cancer to pregnancy and HIV infection.

Jurors in Holmes’ trial heard evidence that Holmes doctored internal Theranos documents by adding pilfered pharmaceutical companies’ logos to suggest the firms had validated her technology, and that she and Theranos had falsely suggested to investors that her machines were in battlefield use. The jury also heard that Theranos provided investors with wildly inflated revenue expectations and that it sought to cover up the poor performance of its machines.

Federal criminal appeals succeed at very low rates, according to the federal courts system. If Holmes loses, she could appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, but its justices only hear about 100 to 150 appeals per year of the more than 7,000 it is typically asked to review, according to the courts system. The judges Tuesday did not say when they would rule on her appeal.

Also on Tuesday in the same court, Patrick Looby, a lawyer representing Holmes and former Theranos president Sunny Balwani argued before the three judges that Davila’s order that the pair pay more than $450 million in restitution to investors should be thrown out.

Looby argued that their fraud did not rob Theranos of its “residual” value. “The fact that the investors may have had difficulty selling their shares is not owing to the fraud,” Looby asserted. “It’s just the nature of investing in a private company.”

Volkar argued that victims had “no opportunity” to recoup their costs.

Nelson appeared to agree.

“If you can’t recoup,” Nelson said, “it’s not residual value.”

The H-1B, an employment permit intended for foreign workers with specialized skills, is heavily used by Silicon Valley’s technology companies, but questionable use of the visa has mired it in controversy.

Under the proposal issued Thursday by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, renewals involving a change in job title or a significant switch in duties would also be newly subject to the fee.

The change would affect companies employing at least 50 workers, with more than half of them on the H-1B or on the related but less widely used L-1 visa for executives and managers.

Currently, the fee for such businesses has applied to new H-1B applications and H-1B renewal applications involving a change of employer.

Homeland Security said in its notice of the proposed new fee rule, published in the Federal Register, that the change would raise about $157 million a year.

The $4,000 charge, called the “biometric fee,” has been imposed since 2015 to fund an automated system that uses facial imagery to track non-Americans entering and leaving the U.S. In its fee proposal, Homeland Security claimed that without the increase, it would not be able to “maintain its current biometric entry operations or continue implementing other essential entry and exit programs.”

The agency estimated that the new fee would hit about 22,000 renewal applications per year. Relatively small employers across “a wide range” of industries could be affected, including software publishing, data processing, computer-systems design, and engineering, Homeland Security said.

The agency is taking public comment through July 8, for review before finalizing any rule.

Companies apply for the H-1B by submitting preliminary applications, which go into a lottery that awards an annual maximum of 85,000 new visas. In the Bay Area, the most recent tally showed nearly 60,000 foreign citizens on the H-1B were approved to work for companies in the region in 2019, according to the Bay Area Council.

Companies use the H-1B both to acquire top foreign talent and to employ lower-cost IT workers. Critics point to abuses including replacement of U.S. workers by visa holders, while the tech industry lobbies to boost the annual 85,000 cap.

Earlier this year, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration hiked fees for the preliminary H-1B applications known as “registrations” to $250 from $10, starting next year. The agency also boosted the fee for applications selected in the lottery to $780 from $460, starting this year.

The Solano Land Trust, which has close ties to Bay Area environmental groups and works with state agencies including the Coastal Conservancy and the Department of Fish and Wildlife, is urging county residents to vote no on the city-from-scratch project in November when it is to appear as a ballot initiative to rezone 17,500 acres of agricultural land.

“A development of this magnitude will have a detrimental impact on Solano County’s water resources, air quality, traffic, farmland, and natural environment,” the Land Trust said in a news release. “The associated pollution will be harmful to both our community and environmental health.”

The project, California Forever, was birthed in 2017, led by former Wall Street trader Jan Sramek. It gained financial backing from billionaire venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Michael Moritz, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and businesswoman Laurene Powell Jobs. Through its real estate arm Flannery Associates, California Forever spent five years secretly buying tens of thousands of acres of ranch land before abruptly sparking an angry uproar among Solano County’s citizenry by filing a $510 million lawsuit against holdout landowners they accused of conspiring, through “endless greed,” to overcharge them.

The plan, suddenly in a spotlight, soon became mired in a broader controversy, with doubts and pointed questions coming from local and state officials all the way up to members of the U.S. Congress. Farmers opposed to the project say it would destroy important agricultural production and a way of life that goes back through generations of ranching families.

In April, California Forever, which has spent more than $800 million buying more than 60,000 acres, said it had gathered and submitted to county authorities more than 20,000 signatures, far beyond the 13,000 valid signatures it needs to make the November ballot. Solano County officials say they will determine by Monday whether the proponents have enough signatures.

In response to the Land Trust’s new opposition to the project, California Forever said in a statement Thursday that it is keeping its plan to 17,500 acres, safely away from sensitive environments including the San Francisco Bay Delta and Suisun Marsh.

“We are proposing a compact, sustainable community where there is no ecological habitat, on poor soils, with low fire risk, according to official state and county maps,” California Forever said. “Due to poor soils, the entire 17,500 acres produces only $6 million worth of agricultural production a year — only 1.6% of Solano County’s total of $385 million.”

Until this week, the Land Trust deliberately avoided weighing in on whether the project should go ahead. But tensions were brewing. Late last year, Sramek and his wife donated $20,000 to the trust, and California Forever announced the funding at a town hall meeting and on its website, describing the money as a grant. Land trust executive director Nicole Braddock disputed in a message to her organization’s mailing list that the money was a grant — which could suggest the trust supported the project — and gave back the money. That spawned a response from Sramek, posted to Facebook by California Forever, accusing Braddock of defaming him, his wife and California Forever.

Even in the wake of that rancorous public spat, Braddock told this news organization in January that “the land trust hasn’t taken a position on the project.”

Braddock said Thursday in a phone interview that the decision to oppose the project came after careful analysis, and weighing the proposal against the trust’s mission to protect land and water for future generations.

“The public is very concerned about water,” Braddock said, noting that Solano County officials have said a new state water plan could significantly cut the county’s water supply during drought years. “The community is really concerned about traffic and the associated pollution. The community is concerned about people coming in with a lot of money from outside of our community to buy land and decide how we should develop.”

Braddock also objected to California Forever’s characterization of the development area as low-value land, as it provides wildlife habitat, helps recharge aquifers and hosts low-impact agriculture. “We’re growing food out there using only rainwater,” Braddock said.

California Forever said its project has already attracted commitments from employers and will also include building California’s biggest solar farm. Its proposed ballot initiative, the company said, provides an opportunity to “lift up our collective communities from Vallejo to Dixon and Fairfield to Rio Vista.”

The notorious founder of the now-defunct Palo Alto blood-testing startup is serving a lengthy sentence at a minimum-security prison in Texas. Theranos, once valued at $9 billion, claimed that its machines could conduct more than a thousand tests — for everything from cancer and diabetes to pregnancy and HIV infection — using just a few drops of blood from a finger-prick.

Holmes’ legal team and the prosecution are set to argue the case at 9 a.m. in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She launched her appeal in late 2022, 11 months after a jury convicted her on four felony counts of defrauding Theranos investors. She is seeking to have her conviction and 11-year prison sentence overturned, which would trigger a new trial.

Lawyers for Holmes, 40, said in a December 2022 court filing that the criminal case tried at U.S. District Court in San Jose that resulted in guilty verdicts was “teeming with issues for appeal.”

Among those issues, her legal team claimed, were purported errors by Judge Edward Davila, who oversaw her case and trial. Holmes alleged that Davila improperly allowed the jury to hear about regulatory action against Theranos and about her company’s voiding of all test results from its problem-plagued “Edison” machines. Those events came after any “relevant” statements Holmes made to investors, and the jury should not have been allowed to hear about them, Holmes’ lawyers argued.

Holmes, a Stanford University dropout, launched Theranos in 2003 and built it into a high-profile company backed by some of America’s richest people: Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and the Walton family of Walmart. Theranos was weakly overseen by a board seeded with luminaries including former U.S. secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz and former U.S. defense secretaries James Mattis and William Perry.

But jurors in her trial heard damning evidence including that Theranos sought to conceal performance problems with its machines — touted as capable of conducting a full range of tests on just a few drops of blood — and that Holmes altered documents to dupe investors as well as falsely suggesting her technology was in battlefield use.

A series of Wall Street Journal exposés starting in 2015 led to federal probes and a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission settlement fining Holmes $500,000 and barring her from serving as an officer or director of a public company for 10 years. In 2018, federal prosecutors filed fraud charges against her.

Ten months after her conviction, Davila sentenced Holmes, who has two young children with hotel heir Billy Evans, to 11 years and three months in prison. She surrendered herself on May 30, 2023, as U.S. Bureau of Prisons inmate No. 24965-111, to Federal Prison Camp Bryan, about 100 miles from Houston.

Updates from the prisons bureau show she has shaved about two years off her sentence and is scheduled to be freed in August 2032. Federal inmates can cut 54 days off their prison terms for each year of their sentences if they meet conduct standards and may cut additional sentence time by completing recidivism-reduction and “productive activities” programs, according to the bureau.

Holmes will not appear at the hearing in person or via video, as only attorneys are typically present before the three-judge panel that hears oral arguments in federal court appeals, and the court does not arrange for incarcerated people to appear, a court spokesman said Tuesday.

Federal criminal appeals succeed at very low rates, according to the federal courts system. If Holmes loses, she could appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, but its justices only hear about 100 to 150 appeals per year of the more than 7,000 it is typically asked to review, according to the courts system.

Insurers contend the plan language released announced Tuesday evening — which affects home, rental, vehicle, boat and small business policies — would help fix the state’s wildfire-linked insurance crisis that has seen rates climb, coverage dramatically shrink and insurers flee the state.

Newsom’s plan would impose a hard 120-day deadline for the state Department of Insurance to approve or deny insurance companies’ applications to raise premiums. Although the process is by law supposed to take only 60 days, the department routinely receives insurers’ consent to waive that deadline to allow its staff to conduct a review, so it can take more than two years, said Carmen Balber, executive director of Consumer Watchdog, a consumer advocacy group.

“The governor’s plan invites insurance companies to set their own prices” and would “cost insurance consumers billions in savings from future public rate challenges,” Balber said. “The idea that this is a quick fix that’s going to right California’s insurance market is a pipe dream.”

Forcing decisions within 120 days would hamper consumer groups’ ability to provide effective input into the process and challenge attempts to raise rates — oversight that has saved California consumers $6 billion since 2002, Balber said. Consumer Watchdog’s founder authored the state’s voter-approved insurance regulations.

The new time limit would also cut the state’s ability to properly examine rate-increase applications, and insurers would have little incentive to answer questions and provide data when the insurance department must issue a decision within 120 days, Balber said.

Alex Stack, a spokesman for Newsom’s office, said Wednesday that the proposal requires the Department of Insurance to “modernize and streamline its rate application process” to comply with the expedited timelines imposed by 1988’s Proposition 103.

“It makes no changes to the rules in Prop 103 for how much an insurance company can charge, which continues to be that rates cannot be ‘excessive, inadequate, or unfairly discriminatory,’” Stack said. “This is part of our larger package of solutions to ensure Californians have adequate access to insurance and combat market exodus that hurts consumers.”

California’s insurance industry has melted down in the wake of massive wildfires in recent years that have led to billions of dollars in claims. A year ago, the state’s largest insurer, State Farm, said it would stop offering new property insurance in California, and in March, the company said it would not renew 72,000 policies statewide, including thousands in the Bay Area.

Many other major insurers have limited coverage, particularly in areas of high fire risk. The crisis has pushed thousands of homeowners into the state-mandated FAIR Plan, the costly insurer of last resort backed by a pool of property insurance companies which face skyrocketing liability exposure.

Last fall, California’s elected insurance commissioner, Ricardo Lara, spurred by Newsom, announced a plan that met several insurance industry demands, including quicker approval for rate increases in exchange for a commitment to offer coverage in fire-risk areas.

Lara promised changes by the end of the year, but Newsom at his May budget presentation said, “I don’t think we have that much time.” His proposal released Tuesday would add the proposed changes to the budget as a “trailer bill” to be voted on next month, possibly bypassing committee hearings in the Assembly and Senate.

“The timeline on this and whether or not it’ll go through committee will be worked out with the Legislature,” Stack said.

Officials at the Department of Insurance had no immediate comment.

Insurers said Wednesday that they were “evaluating the language” of the governor’s proposal but that it addresses a critical need.

“Year-long delays in the rate-approval process have created a significant market imbalance – forcing more than half of the state’s top 15 insurers to restrict new policies or exit out of the market entirely,” said Denni Ritter, vice-president for state government relations at the American Property Casualty Insurance Association. “Streamlining approvals is key to modernizing our regulatory system and fixing the California insurance crisis.”

State Sen. Susan Rubio, chair of the Senate Insurance Committee, on Wednesday applauded Newsom’s “proposal to help reduce unnecessary red tape,” and said she looked forward to working with his administration and the Legislature to pass laws that would stabilize the insurance market and “result in more accessible and affordable insurance coverage for California consumers.”

Balber, however, doubts whether Newsom’s plan would deliver the results consumers need, especially given the nationwide cost increases and FAIR plan liability insurers are facing.

“There is no reason to think that this change will change the access and affordability crisis that we’re facing in California,” Balber said. “Insurance companies want faster, higher rate increases but there’s no reason to think that that’s going to bring them back into the market.”

Since 2019, Tesla, which made $17.7 billion in profit last year according to regulatory filings, has allowed 112 illegal toxic releases, each containing as much as 750 pounds of harmful contaminants, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District said in a news release early this month.

Even low levels of ozone created when the emitted chemicals meet sunlight can harm health, especially for children, older people and those with asthma, the district said. Other released contaminants can cause cancer and, even at low levels, neurological damage and reproductive and developmental damage, according to the regulatory agency, which pointed to Tesla’s paint-spraying booths and paint-baking ovens as sources of the pollution.

Tesla did not respond to requests for comment on the district’s investigation and allegations or claims in the lawsuit.

District officials announced May 2 that they were seeking an order to shut down the Fremont plant’s two car-painting departments if Tesla would not agree to hire outside experts to help stop the emissions.

The district said this week that it had previously probed Tesla’s pollution from the factory and found it resulted from repeated problems in the painting departments’ containment systems and production lines.

“Operational changes were made by Tesla, but ultimately, they were not enough,” said district spokeswoman Kristina Chu, adding that the agency may sue Tesla over the emissions.

Despite “extensive discussion” between district officials and the company, Tesla has not stemmed the emissions, the district said in its request for an order from its hearing board, which rules on regulatory-compliance issues.

Meanwhile, the car maker led by notoriously regulation-hostile CEO Elon Musk is facing a new lawsuit by a local environmental group claiming Tesla’s “extensive and ongoing” pollutant releases are exposing residents and workers in the area to harmful chemicals, including arsenic.

“It feels to us like profits are more important than actually being a good neighbor and supporting human health,” said Tanya Boyce, executive director of the Environmental Democracy Project, a nonprofit corporation that filed the lawsuit last week in San Francisco U.S. District Court. Boyce noted that children attend Bringhurst Elementary school within a mile of the Tesla plant.

Her group’s lawsuit, which cites “a long history of noncompliance with environmental laws” at the factory, alleged Tesla broke federal air quality rules more than 160 times between January 2021 and January 2024.

Records from Tesla submitted with the lawsuit list more than 90 violations between January 2022 and June 2023 of the company’s permit from the air quality district. Tesla attributed the causes nearly every time to “unforeseen” breakdowns and malfunctions, according to the records.

The air quality district in its news release described Tesla’s emissions as “foreseeable.”

The Environmental Democracy Project targets pollution affecting communities of color. The City of Fremont describes itself as “one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse cities in the Bay Area,” with 63% of residents speaking a language other than English at home. U.S. Census data show the city’s population is 62% Asian, 21% White, 12% Latino and 3% Black.

In a March letter to Musk, the Environmental Democracy Project said it was planning to sue Tesla in federal court over its alleged violations of the federal Clean Air Act because the air quality district had not done so already, “leaving it to citizens like EDP to bring their own enforcement action.”

The Fremont factory, where Tesla makes its models 3, X, Y and S, has long been a target for regulatory and legal action.

In February, eight Bay Area counties sued Tesla, claiming it illegally dumped hazardous waste produced in its Fremont plant and its auto service centers around the region. District attorneys in Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano and Sonoma counties along with 17 other California DAs allege in San Joaquin County Superior Court that the company broke a host of laws on labeling, transportation and disposal of toxic materials.

In a February 2022 settlement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Tesla agreed to pay a $275,000 fine for breaking the Clean Air Act at the Fremont plant over a three-year period.

Tesla in 2021 was fined $750,000 in a settlement with the air district for committing 33 air quality violations since 2015. In 2019, the company agreed to pay a $31,000 penalty over hazardous waste violations at the Fremont factory in another settlement with the U.S. EPA.

Boyce believes the “very small” penalties are just “the cost of doing business” for Tesla.

Musk has frequently defied and disparaged regulations and regulators and tweeted last year, “Like Gulliver, tied down by thousands of little strings, we lose our freedom one regulation at a time.”

In 2018, Musk agreed to pay a $20 million fine to settle a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charge that he misled investors with a tweet about taking Tesla private — then he took to Twitter to mock the SEC. At the start of the COVID pandemic, Tesla kept the Fremont plant running for nearly a week in violation of a public health order, with Musk tweeting that an “ignorant” Alameda County health officer was violating “our Constitutional freedoms.”

Alameda County Superior Court Judge Noël Wise, in a Friday ruling on a lawsuit by Black former Tesla workers, cited more than 500 declarations from Tesla workers who swore under oath that they experienced or observed racial abuse.

Of more than 200 Black workers who gave sworn statements for the lawsuit, about two-thirds said they saw anti-Black graffiti including nooses, racial slurs and swastikas, and about three-quarters said they heard Tesla workers refer to the Fremont plant as “The Plantation” or the “Slave Ship,” according to a court filing. A quarter said higher-ups called them the n-word.

The statements, and others provided to the court by Tesla, “suggest that over a period of approximately eight years Tesla workers in the Fremont factory heard the n-word and otherwise experienced conditions that might reasonably be characterized as race harassment,” Wise wrote.

Bryan Schwartz, an Oakland lawyer representing current and former Black workers in the case, described the judge’s statement as “an incredibly significant finding.”

“Have you ever heard of a similar statement being made about any other employer? I’m not aware of a case where there’s been so many victims of harassment at a single facility over such a long period of time,” Schwartz said.

Tesla did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday on the lawsuit and claims in other similar legal actions.

Wise’s determination follows a federal judge’s finding last year of “awful, pervasive racism” at the facility, which makes the company’s Model S, Y, X and 3 cars, and “Tesla’s repeated failure to rectify it.”

Wise’s order approved class-action status for the lawsuit but ruled that it could not result in Tesla paying damages to affected workers. The court now will try to answer three central questions about how Black workers were treated in the plant and find out whether there is currently pervasive racial abuse at the facility that needs to be addressed through a court order against Tesla.

The hundreds or thousands of workers who may wish to seek damages from Tesla over their treatment at the factory must file separate, individual lawsuits, and answers to the three questions would “establish common facts” to simplify those cases, Wise wrote.

The lawsuit will cover people who worked at the factory between November 2016 and the date of the judge’s order on May 17, Wise wrote.

Schwartz said Wednesday that he expected to start filing those lawsuits later this year and that they could total up to 10,000 cases.

The class-action case, filed by former Tesla worker Marcus Vaughn in 2017 and involving thousands of current and former Black Tesla workers, now will revolve around whether there was a pattern of widespread racial abuse at the Fremont factory, whether Tesla knew or should have known about it, and if Tesla did know, whether it failed to take immediate and appropriate action to stop it.

“It is unclear whether Tesla was aware at all times or became aware of the alleged pervasive race harassment at a certain time; whether Tesla changed the number of HR personnel responsible for responding to complaints of race harassment at a certain time; (or) whether Tesla changed how seriously it took complaints of race harassment,” Wise wrote.

Wise noted that Tesla since October 2011 has had written anti-harassment and anti-discrimination policies and that a senior employee relations official at the company testified in the case that the use of the n-word has been banned at the Fremont factory since at least 2010.

Submissions in the case indicate that since 2015, Tesla has required training on discrimination and harassment, and around 2017 the company started a graffiti remediation program, Wise wrote.

Current and former Black workers at Tesla last year described to this news organization alleged racist abuses, including scrawled and uttered racial slurs, dangerous job assignments, unequal workloads and complaints to supervisors that produced no results or drew further harassment.

Tesla has submitted to the court declarations from 228 people who said they did not observe harassment at the Tesla Fremont factory, or if they did, that Tesla took “immediate and appropriate corrective action,” Wise’s order said.

Tesla, led by CEO Elon Musk, is also fighting several other racism-based lawsuits, including one filed in 2022 by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing and another filed last year by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Last year, a jury in U.S. District Court in San Francisco awarded Black former Tesla worker Owen Diaz $3.2 million in damages in his 2017 lawsuit against the car maker, claiming that he endured “daily racist epithets” at the Fremont plant and that colleagues drew swastikas and left racist graffiti and drawings around the facility. The judge in that case, William Orrick, found that Tesla repeatedly failed to stop “awful, pervasive racism” at the factory.

Tesla said in a 2022 blog post that it “strongly opposes all forms of discrimination and harassment” and claimed that it “has always disciplined and terminated employees who engage in misconduct, including those who use racial slurs or harass others in different ways.”