SAN FRANCISCO – A jury in California yesterday ordered Tesla to pay a black former employee US$137 million (RM572 million) in damages for turning a blind eye to racism that the man encountered at the firm’s auto plant in Fremont, reported United States media.
Owen Diaz was hired through a staffing agency as an elevator operator at the electric vehicle maker’s Fremont factory between June 2015 and July 2016, and was subjected to racist abuse and a hostile work environment, according to the court filing.
In his suit, Diaz said African-American employees at the factory, where his son also worked, were regularly subjected to racist epithets and derogatory imagery.
Instead of a modern workplace, the plaintiffs “encountered a scene straight from the Jim Crow era”, said the suit, originally filed by Diaz, his son Demetric, and a third former employee.
“Tesla’s progressive image was a facade papering over its regressive, demeaning treatment of African-American employees,” said the filing.
Diaz alleged that despite complaints to supervisors, Tesla took no action over the regular racist abuse.
The jury at the federal court here yesterday awarded Diaz US$130 million in punitive damages and US$6.9 million for emotional distress, reported Bloomberg News, citing one of Diaz’s attorneys, Lawrence Organ of the California Civil Rights Law Group.
“We’re just gratified that the jury saw the truth and they awarded an amount that hopefully will push Tesla to correct what people testified about in terms of this widespread racist conduct,” Organ told The Washington Post.
“It’s gratifying to know that a jury’s willing to hold Tesla accountable; one of the world’s largest, richest corporations is finally told, ‘You can’t let this kind of thing happen at your factory’.”
‘Not perfect’
Following the verdict, Tesla released a blog post by human resources vice-president Valerie Capers Workman, which it said has been distributed to employees.
In her post, Workman downplayed the allegations of racist abuse in the suit, but acknowledged that at the time Diaz worked there, Tesla “was not perfect”.
“In addition to Mr Diaz, three other witnesses (all non-Tesla contract employees) testified in the trial that they regularly heard racial slurs (including the N-word) on the Fremont factory floor.
“While they all agreed that the use of the N-word was not appropriate in the workplace, they also agreed that most of the time, they thought the language was used in a ‘friendly’ manner and usually by African-American colleagues.”
She said Tesla responded to Diaz’s complaints, firing two contractors and suspending a third.
She stressed that the company has made changes since Diaz worked there, adding a diversity team and an employee relations team dedicated to investigating staff complaints.
“While we strongly believe that these facts don’t justify the verdict reached by the jury in San Francisco, we do recognise that in 2015 and 2016, we were not perfect.
“We’re still not perfect. But we have come a long way from five years ago. We continue to grow and improve in how we address employee concerns. Occasionally, we’ll get it wrong, and when that happens, we should be held accountable.”
Tesla, a global leader in electric cars, has a market capitalisation of around US$780 billion, and its chief executive, tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, is the world’s richest person, currently worth US$211 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. – AFP, October 5, 2021
