A federal jury in San Francisco ordered Tesla on Monday to pay about $3.2 million to a Black man who had accused the carmaker of ignoring racial abuse he confronted whereas working at its California manufacturing facility.
The award was far lower than the $137 million {that a} completely different jury awarded two years in the past, principally in punitive damages. The choose in that trial later diminished the determine to $15 million, prompting the plaintiff, Owen Diaz, to problem the quantity in a brand new trial.
However moderately than more cash, he’ll come away with much less. After a five-day trial, the jury awarded $3 million in punitive damages, and $175,000 in previous and future noneconomic damages.
Mr. Diaz mentioned he had been subjected to repeated racist offenses whereas working as a contractor at Tesla’s manufacturing facility in Fremont, close to San Francisco, in 2015 and 2016. Whereas there, he mentioned, a supervisor and different colleagues incessantly used racial slurs, together with in reference to him. Staff additionally wrote racial epithets, and drew symbols and caricatures, across the manufacturing facility, he mentioned.
Mr. Diaz mentioned that the offenses had taken an emotional toll on him and that he had introduced them to the corporate’s consideration, however that Tesla had carried out little to deal with them. He mentioned he had tolerated the hostilities till his son started working on the manufacturing facility and confronted related remedy.
“The prevalence of using the N-word inside Tesla’s office is a sign that they didn’t care about how their African American workers felt,” Bernard Alexander, one among Mr. Diaz’s attorneys, mentioned in a closing argument within the newest trial. “It was a whole affront to each African American contained in the office.”
Tesla’s attorneys steered that Mr. Diaz had overstated the impression and extent of the racial harassment he had confronted, encouraging the jury to reduce the injury award.
However the firm’s legal responsibility for having subjected Mr. Diaz to a hostile work surroundings and having failed to forestall racial harassment was not on trial. That had already been “conclusively decided,” Decide William H. Orrick mentioned in directions offered to jurors. As an alternative, the jury’s accountability was to find out how a lot Mr. Diaz was owed.
Decide Orrick additionally presided over the unique trial.
After the 2021 trial, Tesla’s head of human assets mentioned the corporate had fired two contractors and suspended one other in response to Mr. Diaz’s complaints. The chief acknowledged that the corporate was “not good” in 2015 and 2016, however mentioned that it had since come a good distance.
