Tesla was sentenced to pay $ 137 million in compensation to a former African-American employee who was a victim of workplace racism. The US car company protested immediately, disputing the reported facts, claiming that they do not justify this sentence. The conviction came from a federal jury in San Francisco, California, which awarded former employee Owen Diaz compensation of 130 million for punitive damages and 6.9 million for emotional suffering.
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“While we strongly believe that these facts do not justify the verdict reached by the San Francisco jury, we recognize that in 2015 and 2016 we were not perfect,” reacted Valerie Capers Workman, vice president of human resources. The same executive then specified that Tesla had in any case responded to the reports made by Diaz to his direct employers, firing two contractors and suspending a third, and that there was no direct testimony confirming the use of the ‘n- word ‘towards him. In addition, in his reports, Diaz would never report being offended with the n-word, until he was hired full-time by Tesla and hired a lawyer. Indeed, after the dismissal and suspension of contractors, Diaz would have said he was “very satisfied” with the outcome of the internal investigations, while subsequently filing a complaint for “racial harassment”, also involving his son and daughter who worked with him in Tesla.
The leaders of Tesla – the world‘s leading electric vehicle company, owned by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk – have assured that they have made many strides in terms of protecting diversity within the company over the past 5 years, with the creation of a a dedicated ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ team and another team that investigates reports of racism and discrimination made by its employees.
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“We recognize that we still have work to do to ensure that every employee feels they can bring all of themselves to work at Tesla – concluded Workman – We will continue to remind everyone who enters the workplace that any discriminatory insults, regardless of intent or by those who use them, will not be tolerated “. The decision of the Californian federal jury is part of a context of extreme attention and sensitivity towards episodes of racism and discrimination on a racial basis both in public life and in the private sector, in the wake of the US and global movement of Black Lives Matter, after the George Floyd was killed in May 2020 in Minneapolis by a police officer.
The racist offenses date back to the period between June 2015 and July 2016, months of Diaz’s employment as an elevator operator at the Fremont car factory, contracted with external companies, Citistaff and nextSource. Based on the testimony and the reconstruction of the facts in court, it emerged that in a hostile work environment Diaz, together with his son Demetric and other African-American employees, were regularly subject to racist epithets, such as n-word (which stands for ‘ nigger ‘) and derogatory images, including racist graffiti in the bathrooms.
“Tesla’s progressive image was a front mask on the regressive and humiliating treatment of African American employees,” ruled court-published documentation. “We are just gratified that the jury saw the truth and awarded an amount that will hopefully push Tesla to correct what people have testified about in terms of this widespread racist conduct,” said Lawrence Organ, member of the legal group for Human Rights in California, one of Diaz’s defenders.
“It is gratifying to know that a jury is willing to hold Tesla accountable. One of the largest and richest companies in the world is finally being told, ‘You can’t let this kind of thing happen in your factory,'” the lawyer added. defender.
On the one hand, it turned out that despite complaints to his supervisors about the racist attacks he suffered, Tesla never took concrete action. On the other hand, other details and conflicting information emerged regarding the Diaz case. The first aspect concerns the fact that the worker was not hired directly by Tesla but by external companies. All witnesses acknowledged that the discriminatory language against them, while not suitable for a work environment, was nevertheless often used in a “friendly” manner and usually by African American colleagues.
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