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Owen Diaz, the plaintiff in the case, reported that he regularly heard racist slurs, including the n-word, in the Fremont factory, and that he saw racist graffiti in bathrooms and a cartoon insensitive to race.
The verdict included $ 6.9 million in compensatory damages and $ 130 million in punitive damages. The case was decided by an eight-person jury in San Francisco that included a black juror, according to Lawrence Organ, Diaz’s attorney.
Tesla did not respond to whether she intends to appeal, which can only be filed after certain post-trial motions. David Oppenheimer, professor and director of the Center on Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law at the University of California at Berkeley, said he believed it was the largest monetary award given to a single complainant for harassment racial.
“We recognize that in 2015 and 2016, we weren’t perfect. We’re still not perfect,” said the post from Valerie Capers Workman, Tesla vice president, People. “But we’ve come a long way in the past 5 years. We continue to grow and improve the way we respond to employee concerns.”
Workman, who is black, wrote that there were no witnesses that Diaz was called the n-word. And she claimed that although witnesses said they “regularly heard racial slurs (including the n-word) in the Fremont factory,” she said “that most of the time they thought the language was used in a “friendly” manner and generally by African-American colleagues. “
Organ described Workman’s claims of how the racial epithet has been used as “absurd and shows you Tesla’s lack of sensitivity.”
“They have to clean up their act,” he said. “We hope this verdict will make them wake up and do something.”
Workman called Diaz in his post an “elevator operator”. Organ said it was an attempt to decrease Diaz’s work because his duties included using a forklift to move key parts between floors in the factory. Diaz, 53, now works as a bus driver in Oakland, Organ said.
Workman also claimed that Diaz only complained about the use of the n-word after being hired full-time by Tesla – and after hiring a lawyer. She also said that on the three times Diaz complained of harassment, Tesla stepped in and made sure that reactive and timely action was taken by the recruitment agencies, resulting in the dismissal of two contractors and the suspension. of one who had drawn a race-insensitive cartoon.
But Organ said Tesla never presented evidence of the firing of these contractors in court or during the discovery process. And he said that a Tesla supervisor who was accused of harassing Diaz was not fired. Tesla made no comment beyond Workman’s statement.
“It sheds light on what’s going on inside the Tesla factory,” Diaz told the newspaper. “Elon Musk, you have been warned. Clean up this factory. “
In May, Melvin Berry, a former Tesla employee, won a million dollar judgment after an arbitrator found out he had been called racist slurs by supervisors and subjected to other racist behavior.
But Organ has also lost cases of racial harassment allegations at Tesla.
Due to the terms of employment at Tesla, Berry was not allowed to sue as Diaz was able to, but had to proceed through arbitration. Organ also represented Berry.
Tesla now requires all contractors working at the plant to also agree to settle disputes through arbitration rather than court proceedings, Organ said. But he has another federal lawsuit he’s trying to get certified as a class action lawsuit against Tesla, also alleging racial harassment. He said he had more than 100 victims who joined in this case.
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