From the New York Times news section:
… The jury agreed with Mr. Diaz’s assertion that Tesla had created a hostile work environment by failing to address the racism he faced. A vast majority of the award — $130 million — was punitive damages against the company. The rest, $6.9 million, was for past and future noneconomic damages to Mr. Diaz.
“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,” Mr. Diaz’s lawyer, Lawrence Organ of the California Civil Rights Law Group, said in an interview.
Mr. Diaz said he had reached a breaking point when he witnessed similar racist epithets directed at his son, Demetric, who secured a job — his first — at the company with Mr. Diaz’s help.
“My son watched his father being broken in front of him,” Mr. Diaz said.
In a message to Tesla staff members that was posted on the company’s website, Valerie Capers Workman, a human resources executive, noted that Mr. Diaz was a contractor, not a Tesla employee, and played down the allegations in the lawsuit.
“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,” she wrote. “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.”
The company, she wrote in the email, was responsive to Mr. Diaz’s complaints, firing two contractors and suspending another.
I look forward to the next discrimination lawsuit against deep-pocketed Tesla on behalf of the workers fired for using the N-word around Mr. Diaz. It will no doubt point out that blacks are being disproportionately fired for using the n-word.
