Tesla To Pay $137m To Former Employee Over Racism At Work
Tesla Inc. lost a trial with a Black former elevator operator and has been mandated to pay him $137 million for having turned a blind eye to racial taunts and offensive graffiti he tolerated at the electric-car maker’s northern California plant, according to the Diaz’s lawyer.
According to Lawrence Organ, a lawyer for Diaz, Diaz, a former contract worker who was hired in 2015 through a staffing agency, experienced a racially hostile work environment. The verdict therefore couldn’t immediately be confirmed in electronic court records.
Diaz’s case marked an uncommon instance in which Tesla, that typically makes use of compulsory arbitration to settle employee disputes, had to defend itself in a public trial. The company almost never loses workplace arbitrations, though it was hit with a $1 million award in May in a case brought by another ex-worker that was similar to Diaz’s.
The trial’s result could embolden shareholder activists who have pushed Tesla’s board, so far without success, to adopt more transparency about its use of arbitration to settle complaints about sexual harassment and racial discrimination. The board is encouraging investors to vote down such a proposal at an October 7 shareholder meeting even as other big Silicon Valley companies, from Alphabet Inc. to Uber Technologies Inc., have backed off the use of mandatory arbitration.
Tesla and its attorney, Tracey Kennedy, didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Tesla said that it never intended to disregard the rights and safety of African-American workers placed by the staffing agency and that all incidents reported by Diaz were investigated and resolved.
In closing arguments to the jury, Kennedy said “Mr. Diaz’s story simply doesn’t make sense” in light of his encouragement to his son and daughter to take up jobs at the company. She further said Diaz’s claims weren’t supported by the evidence.
J. Bernard Alexander III, a lawyer for Diaz, told jurors that “as opposed to a zero-tolerance policy, Tesla had a zero-responsibility policy.”
According to Alexander, “The “n-word” was “pervasive and virtually everywhere”.
He ended his closing remarks by saying, “Being American” is about stepping into the past and “how we repair it”.
