Yesterday, a grand jury in San Francisco ordered Tesla paid just under $3.2 million to a former factory worker who alleged that the automaker ignored the racist treatment he received while working there as a How to be a contractor. The New York Times report The trial lasted five days and ended with plaintiff Owen Diaz receiving “$3 million in punitive damages and $175,000 in past and future non-economic damages.”
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Diaz claims that while he worked for Tesla, other workers and even his superiors regularly used racist slurs, sometimes directed at him. Diaz also claimed these employees “wrote racial slurs, painted symbols and caricatures around the plant,” like time report. After Diaz complained to management about these issues, he said the company did little to prevent racist behavior. Diaz endured racism for a while, but he is said to have criticized his son for being treated similarly when he started working at Tesla.
“The prevalence of using the N word inside Tesla’s workplace is a sign that they don’t care how their African-American employees feel,” said Bernard Alexander, one of the Diaz’s attorney said in the final argument, as quoted by time. “It’s absolutely an affront to every African-American in the workplace.”
But while $3.2 million sounds like a lot of money, it’s essentially small pennies for Tesla, a company with a market capitalization of just under $600 billion. . And it’s much less than the Diaz was originally awarded. Back in 2021, a jury Asking Tesla to compensate Diaz for $ 137 million at the end of a previous trial. The judge then lowered that figure to $15 million, prompting Diaz to protest the judge’s decision in the recently concluded trial.
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Unfortunately for Diaz, that decision meant he lost nearly $12 million. Hopefully going back to the trial will at least help shed more light on Tesla’s alleged history mistreating black employees, ignore sexual harassment of female employees And many safety violations.
