Tesla Ordered To Pay $137 Million To Former Employee Over Racist Treatment

A jury has ordered automobile manufacturer, Tesla, to pay $137 million to a former employee, Owen Diaz, who accused the company of ignoring racial abuse he endured while working there.

Diaz’s lawyer, Lawrence Organ of the California Civil Rights Law Group, revealed this in a statement.

“It’s a great thing when one of the richest corporations in America has to have a reckoning of the abhorrent conditions at its factory for Black people,” said Organ.

Diaz told the New York Times in an interview that he was relieved by the decision of the jury.

“It took four long years to get to this point. It’s like a big weight has been pulled off my shoulders,” he said.

Diaz, who is black, was an elevator operator at Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California, between 2015 and 2016. While there, he said a supervisor and other colleagues referred to him using racial slurs on different occasions.

He said employees had drawn swastikas – the symbol of the German Nazi party commonly used to symbolize hate, anti-Semitism, infamy and derogatory drawings of caricatures of black children around the factory.

According to him, despite repeated complaints, the company did not do much to address the behaviour.

“It’s not like they were removing the offensive behavior, they would just let people keep adding and adding,” he said.

Despite the abuse Diaz himself allegedly faced, he said he only reached his breaking point when he witnessed similar racist behaviour being directed at his son, Demeric, who secured his first job with the company through his help.

After a four-hour deliberation, the jury agreed with Diaz that Tesla had created a hostile work environment by failing to address the many instances of racism he faced.

Of the $137 million awarded to Diaz, $130 million was punitive damages for the company, while the rest of the money was for the emotional distress he suffered.

Diaz alongside his son and another Black former employee sued Tesla but only Diaz’s claims made it to trial.

In an internal email to Tesla staff obtained by Diaz’s lawyer Organ, a human resources executive at Tesla, Valerie Capers Workman downplayed the allegations in the lawsuit, writing that the racial slurs were used in a “friendly” manner.

“In addition to Mr. Diaz, three other witnesses (all non-Tesla contract employees) testified at 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 wrote.

She also claimed that the company did not ignore Diaz’s complaints, writing that two contractors were fired and another was suspended.

She added that Tesla did not believe that the facts justify the verdict while acknowledging that the company was “not perfect” in 2015 and 2016. She said the company was still not perfect but that they had “come a long way.”